[whpalmer4]

It sounds like you will typically have a bunch of different projects for which you might have to offer up a quick status report, correct? I'm going to further assume that you might serve a number of different masters in this regard, possibly with some overlap. For example, you've got your direct boss, and then there's the cross-functional team directing work on the new platform of which you are a part, and so on. I'll assume that someone who is interested in the status of an action which is part of project XYZ won't be unhappy about hearing the status of actions in project XYZ in general, or that you can quickly skip over items that don't apply.

You could do a reasonable approach with a project/planning mode perspective per reporting area. Depending on how many irons you have in the fire, you might wish that one could have folders of perspectives! These perspectives would include only a subset of your full sidebar, and would be fairly dynamic -- you'd have to take a new snapshot every time you added a new project (or folder of projects) to the mix. You should be able to flip through the perspectives and give a cogent report even with the boss breathing down your neck. Think of your individual projects as index cards describing what's going on with that project, and the perspectives are simply groupings of those cards to fit the expected audience, whether that be you, the boss, the new product team, etc. If you try to tackle the job by changing contexts or shuffling projects around, you'll have a difficult time organizing for more than one audience, I think.