Status Update Streamliner

The reason status updates are painful is that they're being written from raw activity ("had three meetings, sent five emails") into a format designed for outcomes ("decisions made, milestones hit, risks materialising"). This skill does the translation. You paste in whatever you've got — stream-of-consciousness notes, Slack copies, calendar reviews, a memory dump — and it extracts the items that matter, drops the filler, and slots them into the format your organisation actually uses. PPM/governance, traffic-light summary, scrum/agile, client-facing, board-level — same data, different packaging.

The RAG calibration is mechanical, not vibes-based. GREEN requires all three of on schedule (within 5% of dates), on budget (within 10% of spend), and scope tracking. AMBER if any one is slipping but recoverable. RED if any one is genuinely at risk and needs intervention. The skill enforces a rule most orgs need but rarely state: never surprise stakeholders with a RED. If something is truly RED, the status update is not the first time they hear it — you call first and the update documents what was already discussed. This is what separates updates that build trust from ones that destroy it.

The extraction rules are opinionated. Activities ("had a meeting with design") get rewritten as outcomes ("design direction approved, dev starts Monday"). Metrics without comparison get rejected ("revenue was £450K" becomes "£450K, up 12% MoM, 3% above target"). Risks without impact and action get rejected ("timeline might slip" becomes "vendor delay may push launch by one week; mitigation in place; decision needed by Friday"). The result is a doc the skip-reader can parse in 15 seconds — bolded asks, traffic light up top, structure they can jump through.

It also handles the failure modes specific to status reporting. The "perpetual GREEN" problem — six updates in a row of GREEN — gets gentle scrutiny, because that's often boiling-frog risk normalisation. The first update on a new project gets extra structure because it sets the template for all subsequent ones. And for the Friday-5pm panic, Quick Status mode gives you five lines — status, this week, next week, risk, need — because a brief update sent on time beats a detailed one sent Monday.