25-08-2017, 09:32 PM
WRITING EFFECTIVE PROJECT REPORTS
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INTRODUCTION
You are a member of a project team assigned to review fuel procurement policies for an
electric utility. Or perhaps your task is to investigate the feasibility of integrating
automated bar-coding schemes into the production and shipping facilities of an
automotive supplier. Or possibly you are a student dealing with these problems as part of
a case project assignment. You have a real or hypothetical client who must make a
decision based on your recommendation. The client may be your superior and hence
internal to your organization, or you may be employed by a consulting firm working for
an external client. Or you may have an instructor who must evauate your project work.
Your team has investigated the problem, performed an analysis and must communicate
its recommendations by writing a project report. How should you go about composing
this report?
In what follows, I present guidelines, recommendations and strategies for writing project
reports of this type. These strategies are based on an assumption of pure self-interest for
you or your project team − you want to do the best you can to preserve or enhance your
standing in your organization and to further your career goals. One of the best ways to
accomplish this is to establish your competence with the client or your instructor. That
is, you want to instill confidence in your analysis, results and recommendations, and
instill confidence in your own capabilities, both in problem-solving and in presenting
your case. You want to maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation in
achieving these objectives.
Your Goals In Writing A Project Report
Figure 1 presents an objectives hierarchy for writing a project report. The hierarchy
divides the overall objective of maximizing the effectiveness of your written presentation
into four sub-objectives. The first two sub-objectives, demonstrating familiarity with the
problem and establishing modeling expertise, help establish your competence. These two
sub-objectives relate to the substance of your report. If you do not achieve these, then
your recommendations will not be convincing, regardless of how polished your written
presentation is.
The third sub-objective is maximizing reader insight. You can achieve this by
judiciously drawing attention to intuitive aspects of the problem on which your results
crucially depend, or by emphasizing parts of your analysis which explain simply what
should be done or why. It is very important to explain and not merely describe your
results. If the substance of your report is solid but the client gains no insight into his
problem by reading your report, then the client is much less likely to implement your
recommendations.
STRUCTURING YOUR DOCUMENT EFFECTIVELY
The document structure we have recommended for project reports in this course consists
of the following, arranged in the order indicated:
• A title page
• A Summary
• A Table of Contents (optional for very short reports)
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• An Introduction section
• An Analysis section, optionally divided into subsections
• A Conclusions and Recommendations section
• A References section (optional)
• One or more Appendix sections (optional)
Please create these sections, in this order, unless you have compelling reasons to revise
the list. Each element of this structure will serve one or more of your goals in its own
particular way, as we will discuss below. However, as Figure 3 emphasizes, the overall
purpose of establishing this kind of document structure is to provide the reader a get-tothe-
point option, as well as a top-down option. A reader wishing to get the gist of your
report can peruse your section headings to see in broad outline what you have done. He
or she may then skip over certain sections or subsections and focus on others.
Use Content-Heavy Headings
The purpose of document structurer is to provide your reader with “top down” and “get to
the point” options. These options can only be realized, however, if your section and
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subsection headings convey content meaningfully. You should strive to achieve this. It
is literally true that the best section headings make it less likely that your reader will need
to read the section. Here are some examples.