Author, manager and developer Michael Lopp:
This morning I realized I might have a productive way to twist status reports into a useful exercise. Let’s call them context reports. A status report documents actions both completed and planned. A context report documents the reason why (and to a lesser extent how) you’re completing these actions and I suspect this information is far more useful to everyone involved.
Being in a job where I’m rarely physically present in most meetings, it’s annoying when I see bullet after bullet point of exactly what happened. The why is so much more important.