Final Project Recommendation report
Planning your report
The report must include the following sections:
Title Page
· A good title indicates the subject and purpose of the document. One way to indicate the purpose is to use a generic term—such as analysis, recommendation, summary, or instructions
· Prepared for: Who The names and positions of the principal reader and the writers of the document.
· Prepared by: The names and positions of the principal reader and the writers of the document.
· The date the document is submitted
Table of Contents
The table of contents, the most important guide to navigating the report, has two main functions: to help readers find the information they want and to help them understand the scope and organization of the report.
A table of contents uses the same headings as the report itself. Therefore, to create an effective table of contents, you must first make sure that the headings are clear and that you have provided enough of them. If the table of contents shows no entry for five or six pages, you probably need to partition that section of the report into additional subsections. In fact, some tables of contents have one entry, or even several, for every report page.
Executive Summary
The executive summary (sometimes called the executive overview, management summary, or management overview) is a brief condensation of the report addressed to managers. Most managers need only a broad understanding of the projects that an organization undertakes and how they fit together into a coherent whole.
An executive summary for a report of under 20 pages is typically one page (double-spaced). For longer reports, the maximum length is often calculated as a percentage of the report, such as 5 percent.
The executive summary presents information to managers in two parts:
Background. This section explains the problem or opportunity: what was not working or was not working effectively or efficiently, or what potential modification of a procedure or product had to be analyzed.
Major findings and implications. This section might include a brief description—only one or two sentences—of the methods, followed by a full paragraph about the conclusions and recommendations.
An executive summary differs from an informative abstract. Whereas an abstract focuses on the technical subject (such as whether the public is taking advantage of the data from smart electric meters), an executive summary concentrates on the managerial implications of the subject for a particular company (such as whether PECO, the Philadelphia utility company, should carry out a public-information campaign to educate customers about how to use their smart meters).
Introduction
The introduction helps readers understand the technical discussion that follows. Start by analyzing who your readers are. Then consider these questions:
· What is the subject of the report? If the report follows a proposal and a progress report, you can probably copy this information from one of those documents, modifying it as necessary. Reusing this information is efficient and ethical.
· What is the purpose of the report? The purpose of the report is not the purpose of the project. The purpose of the report is to explain a project from beginning (identifying a problem or an opportunity) to end (presenting recommendations).
· What is the background of the report? Include this information, even if you have presented it before; some of your readers might not have read your previous documents or might have forgotten them.
· What are your sources of information? Briefly describe your primary and secondary research, to prepare your readers for a more detailed discussion of your sources in subsequent sections of the report.
· What is the scope of the report? Indicate the topics you are including, as well as those you are not.
· What are the most significant findings? Summarize the most significant findings of the project.
· What are your recommendations? In a short report containing a few simple recommendations, include those recommendations in the introduction. In a lengthy report containing many complex recommendations, briefly summarize them in the introduction, then refer readers to the more detailed discussion in the recommendations section.
· What is the organization of the report? Indicate your organizational pattern so that readers can understand where you are going and why.
· What key terms are you using in the report? The introduction is an appropriate place to define new terms. If you need to define many terms, place the definitions in a glossary and refer readers to it in the introduction.
Methods
The methods section answers the question “What did you do?” In drafting the methods section, consider your readers’ knowledge of the field, their perception of you, and the uniqueness of the project, as well as their reasons for reading the report and their attitudes toward the project. Provide enough information to enable readers to understand what you did and why you did it that way. If others will be using the report to duplicate your methods, include sufficient detail.
Results
Whereas the methods section answers the question “What did you do?” the results section answers the question “What did you see or determine?”
Results are the data you discovered or compiled. Present the results objectively, without comment. Save the interpretation of the results—your conclusions—for later. If you combine results and conclusions, your readers might be unable to follow your reasoning and might not be able to tell whether the evidence justifies your conclusions.
Your audience’s needs will help you decide how to structure the results. How much they know about the subject, what they plan to do with the report, what they expect your recommendation(s) to be—these and many other factors will affect how you present the results. For instance, suppose that your company is considering installing a VoIP phone system that will enable employees to make telephone calls over the Internet, and you conducted the research on the available systems. In the introduction, you explain the disadvantages of the company’s current phone system. In the methods section, you describe how you established the criteria you applied to the available phone systems, as well as your research procedures. In the results section, you provide the details of each phone system you are considering, as well as the results of your evaluation of each system.
Conclusions
Conclusions answer the question “What does it mean?” They are the implications of the results. To draw conclusions, you need to think carefully about your results, weighing whether they point clearly to a single meaning.