Status Reporting Cadence — Requirements for Periodic Written Status

This document specifies requirements for status reporting cadence in professional and quasi-professional written communication.

It applies to periodic written status reporting on work of more than four weeks' duration.

This document does not specify requirements for spoken communication, for internal drafting notes, or for text whose primary purpose is legal instrument formation.

The following documents are referred to in the text in such a way that some or all of their content constitutes requirements of this document.

For dated references, only the edition cited applies. For undated references, the latest edition of the referenced document applies.

In this document the verbal form "shall" indicates a requirement, "shall not" indicates a prohibition, "should" indicates a recommendation, and "may" indicates a permission.

Terms and definitions given in SQLBL 1000 and the following apply.

3.1 status report — periodic written account of progress against a stated plan

3.2 reporting period — interval covered by a single status report

Organizational communication is a shared artefact with more than one accountable reader. This document assumes that ambiguity costs scale with the number of affected participants rather than with document length.

Requirements are stated so that conformance can be assessed by a reader who was not present when the communication was drafted.

Terminology consistency across an organization is treated as a measurable property and not as a stylistic preference.

5.1 A status report shall state the reporting period and the plan against which progress is reported.

5.2 A report shall distinguish completed work from work in progress.

5.3 Where the plan has changed, the change shall be reported before progress.

5.4 A report shall not omit a previously reported risk without stating its resolution.

5.5 Reports shall be issued on a fixed cadence and shall be issued even where no progress occurred.

A document conforms to SQLBL 1202:2026 where every requirement expressed with the verbal form "shall" in Clause 5 is satisfied and no requirement expressed as "shall not" is violated.

Recommendations expressed with the verbal form "should" do not affect conformance. Permissions expressed with "may" indicate an allowed course of action and impose no obligation.

Conformance claims shall take the form: "This document conforms to SQLBL 1202:2026, Edition 1." Partial conformance shall be declared by clause number, for example "conforms to SQLBL 1202:2026 Clauses 5.1 and 5.2 only."

Conformance may be assessed manually or by an automated checker. Where an automated checker is used, the assessment record shall identify the checker and the catalog release of SQLBL-1202 against which it was run.

Reporting on a fixed cadence including empty periods is more informative than reporting only when there is news.

Plan changes reported after progress are routinely missed by readers who stop at the first section.

Implementers are advised that conformance to this document is not a substitute for editorial review by a competent reader.

EXAMPLE 1 — Conforming. Period: 2026-03-02 to 2026-03-13. Plan revised on 2026-03-05 (scope reduced to two regions). Completed: migration harness. In progress: reconciliation mapping.

EXAMPLE 1 — Non-conforming. Good progress this fortnight across most workstreams; more updates to follow.

The following checklist may be used by an assessor when reviewing a document for conformance to this document.