In general, what's worked for me in the past is to have someone do a shared state update every 15 minutes or so (pick the appropriate time interval here). It sh

In general, what's worked for me in the past is to have someone do a shared state update every 15 minutes or so (pick the appropriate time interval here). It should be done by a senior person (or people), and they have to understand either the end-to-end of the whole system or the end-to-end of their part of the system. One goal is to keep management up-to-date. The other goal is to keep management from interfering with the actual effort, which they are wont to do. It could be something as simple as someone going "where are we at." And at the end of the status update everyone agrees on when the next update time should be. If something's going to take a while that needs to be communicated.