Sitrep

Sitrep

Situation reports are for the person who was not in the room. Write for them.

A sitrep is not a diary of activity. It is a compressed, actionable picture of current state. Three questions: what is done, what is blocked, what is next. Anything that does not answer one of those three questions does not belong in the sitrep.

When to use

• Daily standup synthesis from work logs, commits, or ticket state
• End-of-sprint summary for stakeholders
• Incident situation report during or after an active incident
• Handoff summary when switching context or handing work to another agent or person
• When a stakeholder asks "where are we?" and the honest answer is "it's complicated"

Procedure

1. Gather the current work state — read from available sources:

   • Open and recently closed issues / tickets
   • Recent commits (last 24-48 hours for a standup; last sprint for a sprint summary)
   • Project status and roadmap documents (e.g. docs/operating-model/PROJECT-OPERATING-PROFILE.md, docs/ROADMAP.md, or equivalent per project structure)
   • Any blocking flags, risk register entries, or escalation notes

2. Classify items into three buckets:

   • Done — completed and verifiably closed (test passing, ticket closed, deployed)
   • Blocked — work that cannot progress without a specific unresolved dependency (name the blocker precisely)
   • Next — the highest-priority items that will be worked next (ordered by priority)

3. Write the sitrep — structure:

   ## Sitrep — <date> [<scope: sprint / incident / handoff>]
   
   **Done**
   - <item> — <one sentence on what was delivered and its evidence>
   
   **Blocked**
   - <item> — blocked on <specific dependency / owner / ETA if known>
   
   **Next**
   - <item> — <priority order, most important first>
   
   **Risks / flags** (optional — only if material)
   - <risk> — <impact if unresolved> — <owner>
   

4. Apply the compression test — for each line: if removing it changes nothing that the reader needs to act on, remove it.

5. Name blockers precisely — "blocked on backend" is not a blocker entry. "Blocked on API contract for /v2/orders — waiting on @owner, ETA unknown" is.

6. Do not editorialise progress — "made good progress" is noise. "Delivered X, which unblocks Y" is signal.

Outputs

• A sitrep in the format above
• Optional: a one-paragraph executive summary for stakeholders who need even less

Guardrails

• No activity reporting. "Worked on the auth module" is not a sitrep entry. "Auth module: JWT validation complete, token refresh failing under load — investigating" is.
• Blocked means blocked. If something is moving slowly but not actually blocked, it belongs in "Next" with a note, not "Blocked."
• Done means done. "95% done" is not done. If it is not verifiably complete, it is "Next."
• Length is not quality. A five-line sitrep that answers the three questions is better than a twenty-line one that does not.