The Importance of Reporting (2024)

The main purpose of this post is to share some personal observations, ideas, tips and tricks for reporting that works well for me. Through my years I realised that I enjoyed doing reports.

Since I am closer to reaching four (4) decades of experience, I was exposed to a very wide varieties of reports from OoM, PFS, FS, technical, surveys, construction, mechanical assessments, weekly, monthly, flash, visits, claims, audits and due diligence. They came from various sources such as engineering firms, consulting firms, suppliers, contractors, consultants and or research facilities. I also have had the opportunities to collaborate and lead many of them as well.I have witnessed the entire spectrum of reports from poorly done to high quality and excellent. Reports are important since they can decide a project future, highlight recommendations, shown options, highlights results, attract investors looking to invest in your project and or keep stakeholders informed on progress.

After all of these years I observed that not everybody is skilled or have the talent for properly write and or lead a report. The following are some of the few items that are important to consider;

• Enjoying report writing is the first key to success of a comprehensive and good report.
• Google translate can be used for bulk translate but some extensive time need to be dedicated after to ensure the details and technical meaning are carried properly.
• Good reporting is a blend of various elements starting with good writing skills, a sense of artistic talent for presenting photos and graphics. Choosing fonts, colors and sizes are important to balance the visuals.
• Never forget that you write a report for a specific audience and various people that won’t be familiar with all the details of the project. Some readers will just focus on a particular section, or the Executive Summary or just look at a particular appendix detail.
• A proper Table of Contents is a key to ensure a proper flow and good logic to ensure the report goals are met.
• Developing the Table of Contents, the flow of presentation and the list of appendices are the critical steps prior to doing anything. It fixes the deliverables that need to be produced to support the report. Then use that list to distribute the work to develop these deliverables and set the expectations for the level of deepness required for each of them.
• Have your client and sponsor approval and support before starting. Too often I have seen clients or the end users disappointed of the report because they were not involved and they were expecting something else. Avoid burning all your budget ahead writing something that will need to be redone later.
• Proof reading is crucial. I have seen a lot of report with a lot of errors, typo and not formatted properly. A report poorly written leave a bad impression and may not bring your project forward or get proper traction.
• Have a person totally not familiar with the project read it to see if he understands the report objectives and the clarity. This is a very wise thing to do.
• Have your report proof read by various people with various skills. I observed that not everybody has the talent to write an executive summary, in a corporate language, or have the ability to summarised concisely the information to a management level.
• I have tried various formulas such as several people writing a different section in one (1) single document. That ends up in lack of writing uniformity and most of the time the formatting is hard to fixed. I also delegated them to various engineers to lead reports without assessing their skills. Most of the time these reports need to be redone and create a lot of frustrations and unwanted delays. This also created dissatisfaction from sponsors.
• A report should be visually attractive with proper font selection and uniformity of fonts across the entire report. Proper size of photos and alignment, proper choice of colors is also important when doing graphics, clear scanned documents proper indenting and left-right justification. I have witnessed a lot of excel sheets poorly done, not formatted, stretched logos, nothing justified or centered.
• A good report will always have a higher impact, maximise the chance of your project to move forward, provide confident that the home work have been done and will capture the attention of your audience.

Hoping this will help some of you in the future.