formal report

Executive Summary

An executive summary will summarize everything contained in your formal report. This includes your cases and your conclusion and recommendations. You can’t write this part of your paper until you know exactly what your report says, and you won’t know what you’re report says until it’s written. So wait to write this until you’ve finished the report.

An executive summary is never longer than 1/10th the size of the report it precedes. So keep this executive summary to less than half a page. You don’t give details here, just a general overview.

Introduction

The introduction of any paper is where you tell the audience of your paper what you’re going to tell them in the body. Important things to include here:

· Why this is relevant

· Why this particular problem should be stopped

· How a problem like this could impact a company within your audience’s industry

· What companies you’re analyzing

· Your purpose statement

Case Analysis (Body)

· Case 1

· Background of the company and what happened

· How the company responded

· The overall outcome

· Case 2

· Background of the company and what happened

· How the company responded

· The overall outcome

· Case 3

· Background of the company and what happened

· How the company responded

· The overall outcome

Conclusion

Here you’re going to wrap up what you found in the case analysis portion of the report. I recommend that you:

· State which companies successfully handled this problem

· State which companies DID NOT successfully handle this problem

· List the overall takeaways from your analysis

Recommendations

Here’s where you’ll list your recommendations to your audience. This should definitely be in a bulleted list, and they need to be relatively specific. (You won’t be able to tell your audience how to implement the recommendations since you’re not a company insider. But you can state what should be done.)