status-and-steering-pack

Skill: status-and-steering-pack

Purpose: Turn the delivery-lead's earned-value status and the risk-analyst's register into communication that drives a decision — not a wall of tables. Used by stakeholder-comms-lead.

When to use

• Recurring project status (weekly / fortnightly).
• A monthly/quarterly steering-committee or board pack.
• An escalation that needs a sponsor decision.
• Setting up a stakeholder register + comms cadence for a new project.

The procedure

1. Map stakeholders first (power/interest): manage-closely (high/high) gets the steering cadence + detail; keep-satisfied, keep-informed, monitor each get their own depth. The comms plan names, per audience, the message, channel, cadence, and single sender.
2. Narrative first. Open with a plain-English executive summary: what changed, what it means, what the reader must decide/do. Tables are the appendix.
3. The RAG explains itself — "Amber: the gateway dependency slipped a week, pushing the integration milestone; recovery options below." Never a bare colour.
4. Colour matches the numbers. Green cannot sit on a SPI < 1 or an open high risk. If they disagree, fix the colour or fix the number — route back to delivery-lead / risk-and-raid-analyst; don't ship the contradiction.
5. Single source of truth — pull figures from the delivery-lead's EV and the risk register; never restate a number that drifts from its source.
6. Escalations are decision requests: issue → impact → options → recommendation → decision needed by-when → distribution.

Anti-patterns this skill prevents

• A status/pack that opens with a table; a bare RAG colour; green over a red SPI.
• A comms plan with no cadence / channel / single sender per audience.
• An escalation with no explicit decision-needed + by-when.
• Restating figures that have drifted; same depth to every stakeholder.

Output

A status report, steering-pack outline (see ../../templates/steering-pack-outline.md), or escalation memo. End with the stakeholder-comms-lead Output Contract block; route partner/board-facing prose polish to ravenclaude-core/documentarian and any PII handling to ravenclaude-core/security-reviewer.