Project updates

Projects that are behind do not announce themselves. The work simply stops appearing in the channel, and the first sign is a question from further up. The update is a weekly habit with three fields and a deadline. Each project owner writes one line for done, one for blocked, and one for next, and the workflow collects them into a single update instead of five separate messages in the channel. A line with no blocker still has to be written, because a project with nothing to report is information too. Anything that moves a date names the reason and the new date, and the reason is the part that matters later: somebody is assigned to unblock it and appears in the following week's line. Updates missing for a week are listed as overdue instead of rolling forward, so a project nobody is writing about cannot look healthy. A short history is kept so a slip can be traced to the week it was introduced, not re-explained in a meeting. A person still decides whether a date has to move, whether a blocker is a real risk or normal noise, and what to say when the answer is no.