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WRITING EFFECTIVE PROJECT

REPORTS

Gordon B. Hazen

Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences

Northwestern University

January 2004

i

SUMMARY

This document presents strategies you can use to write an effective project report, and prescribes an organizational structure for writing such a report. Four fundamental objectives for writing an effective project report are cited, namely, demonstrate your familiarity with the problem, establish your modeling expertise, maximize reader insight, and minimize reader effort. Writing strategies and organizational structure are meant to secure these objectives. You are expected to be aware of the material in this document and implement it in an appropriate manner when writing assigned project reports.

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.

The fourth sub-objective is minimizing reader effort. Clients are busy people. If you do not provide the client with easy and quick ways to learn the gist of what you have done, then the client is much less likely to read your report, and much less likely to understand what he/she has read. Your instructor may have to read 20 reports like yours in a few days. If s/he cannnot understand what you have written without expending more time than s/he wants, your grade will justifiably suffer. All of the advice given below regarding the organization of your report and proper writing style to use has as its objective to minimize reader effort.

You can save your reader work at the organizational level of your report or at the sentence level, as Figure 2 indicates. The general strategy for minimizing effort at the sentence level can be simply summed up: Avoid forcing the reader to repeatedly read text for understanding. I will elaborate on this below.

The sections below discuss three general strategies for minimizing reader effort at the organizational level.

• Your reader needs to get to the point of your report quickly, and a properly organized report should facilitate this.
• Your reader should be able to follow your document’s structure from the top down. Almost no one will want to read your report through from first page to last in a linear fashion. Your reader should be able to proceed “top down”, by selecting only parts of your report to read in detail while still understanding the purpose and context of other parts to which he/she gives less attention.
• Your reader should be able to choose the level of technical detail he/she wishes to read. A properly organized report will give him/her the option of avoiding technical detail should he/she desire.

All of these objectives and strategies will be further discussed in the sections which follow.

Maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation

Demonstrate your familiarity with the problem

Maximize reader insight

Minimize reader effort

Establish your modeling expertise

Figure 1: An objectives hierarchy for writing a project report. The overall objective of maximizing effectiveness of your written presentation can be divided into the four sub-objectives indicated.

• 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-to- the-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.

Maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation

Minimize reader effort

Provide reader a "top down" option

At the organizational level At the sentence level

Establish an effective document structure Title page Summary Introduction Analysis Conclusion Use content-heavy headings

Provide reader a "get to the point" option

Figure 3: Establish an effective document structure by using a title page and a Summary, creating Introduction, Analysis and Conclusions sections, and using subsections freely with content-heavy headings. The goals served by establishing an effective document structure are to provide the reader a "get to the point" option and a "top down" option.

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

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.

Poor Good Proprietary Tempers

Meeting the Demand for Proprietary Tempers

Hearth Utilization Optimizing Hearth Utilization Introduction Introduction: Incentives for Optimizing Inventory Analysis Using Auger Electron Spectroscopy to Characterize Corrosion Products

Figure 4: Using content-heavy headings can convey meaningful content to your reader. This helps give your readers “top down” and “get to the point” options.

Your Title Page

The standard form we have used for a title page is displayed in Figure 5. It is fine to make up a name for your project team, as was done in the example in the figure. If you are composing the title page, make sure you get your teammates' names right!

Your Summary

The Summary follows the title page and appears on a separate page of its own. At a minimum, your Summary must

Project Title

Names of Team Members Organizational Affiliation of Team Members

Requested by and Submitted to Client’s Name Client’s Affiliation

Date

Cost Estimation for AGI

Julie Kim, Mark Hoffman, Jeff Rechtzigel, Okan Cuntay KimRech Consulting

Requested by and Submitted to Thomas Quinn AGI Inc.

June 7, 1996

Figure 5: The generic form for a title page on the left, and an example title page on the right.

Maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation

Demonstrate your familiarity with the problem

Maximize reader insight Minimize reader effort

Establish your modeling expertise

Briefly state the problem. Summarize important conclusions. Get to the point, fast!

Provide the reader a "get to the point" option

Use an effective summary:

Figure 6: An effective summary includes the minimum amount of information that it takes to communicate the essential message of the report.

Your Introduction

In this section − which can also be titled “Background” or “Project Statement” − you should include:

• Relevant history, such as how this project came about, who sponsored it, and background details about the client organization that are germane to the project.
• A precise statement of the problem, including any restrictions or assumptions that were imposed on the project by the sponsor.
• An overview of the purpose and scope of the study, which gives the specific objective of the study and any major assumptions or constraints that were imposed by your project team.

Maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation

Demonstrate your familiarity with the problem

Maximize reader insight Minimize reader effort

Establish your modeling expertise

Demonstrate familiarity with project genesis and history. Properly identify sponsor and/or client. Demonstrate familiarity with project goals, scope, major assumptions and restrictions.

Use an effective introduction:

Figure 7: An effective Introduction demonstrates your familiarity with the problem.

Your Analysis Section

This section explains how you applied techniques of Industrial Engineering and Management Science to the problem at hand. An effective Analysis section should establish your modeling expertise, while maximizing reader insight and minimizing reader effort. (Figure 8). Included in your discussion should be:

• A careful description of models and techniques that you employed.
• Details of modeling assumptions or constraints that you imposed in order to make your analysis possible.
• A description of whatever data inputs your model required, how you estimated parameter values from data, and where your data came from.
• A description and explanation of the results of the analysis.
• A discussion of whatever verification, validation or sensitivity analysis has been done for the model and results.

terms, citing particular numbers only for emphasis. Again, the goal is to maximize reader insight and minimize reader effort.

If your analysis is particularly technical, you may have a lot of mathematical formulas and numerical tables that you want to provide to the client. To keep the Analysis section readable, it is often a good idea to relegate this material to appendices; see the further discussion of appendix sections below. This strategy minimizes reader effort by giving the reader a “top down” option and the option of avoiding technical details.

Use subsections

Even with details relegated to an appendix, the Analysis section is likely to be the longest part of the report. To help the reader follow it, you will do well to organize it into subsections. Commonly used subsections include

Model Description Assumptions and Justification Data Collection Parameter Estimation Solution Approaches Results Sensitivity Analysis

and so forth − but these are only examples, and you may use some or none of these, or whatever is appropriate to your particular situation. If your analysis is especially lengthy or complex, you may break it into two or three natural parts and devote a whole section to each part. Again, the goal is to give the reader a “top down” option and the option of avoiding technical details.

Explain as well as describe

To increase reader insight, it is particularly important to explain results rather than merely describe them. For example, you may have formulated an optimization model to solve a facility location problem. If the model objective is to minimize total costs, you should not merely describe the optimal solution and its cost, but also give some intuitive justification for the optimality of this site. For instance, site A might be best in spite of its greater distance to key markets because of lower labor costs in its region.

Toy problems

One option that is sometimes useful to give the reader insight into analyses of complex problems is to construct a toy problem , a dramatically simplified version of the original problem. You can illustrate your modeling approach on the toy problem, where it is easy to explain the approach you adopted and give insight into your results. Having armed the reader with an understanding of the essentials of your modeling approach, you can now shift attention back to the original problem and present your results. Had you tried to directly present results for the original problem, the reader may have been overwhelmed by its complexity and understood little of what you presented.

Whether to construct a toy problem is a matter of judgment. An overly complex toy problem only further confuses the reader, and an overly simple one can try his/her

patience. If done well, the technique can be very effective. But if it doesn't "fit", don't use it.

Your Conclusion and Recommendations Section

This section can be titled “Conclusions” or “Recommendations” or both, depending on the nature of the report. In it, you give the implications of your study for the actual system at hand. You need to include the following items:

• A list and discussion of your specific conclusions − paralleling the list you gave in the Summary, but with more detail.
• An explanation − in words − of how your analysis supports your conclusions.
• Recommendations for putting your conclusions into practice in the client’s real system.
• A discussion of “human factors” considerations − the implications of people’s needs and preferences for the implementation of your recommendations.
• Suggestions for further analysis.

Take extra time to make this section readable. Next to the Summary, it is the section most likely to be seen. The presence of a concluding section gives readers a “get to the point” option: Some readers will skim through the report to get to your conclusions, so be sure that this section does not require too much familiarity with the Analysis section to be understood.

Almost always, a single study is not the last word on a problem. While you should try to make your conclusions specific enough to be useful, do not oversell your analysis. If important questions remain, say so, and try to indicate how they might be attacked. Try to suggest further work that you feel is most relevant to the current project and that can be most strongly justified; a long laundry list of vaguely defined future projects will not have as much credibility.

Often in the assigned cases for this course, your task will be to recommend a general procedure for a firm's recurring problem. Usually in such cases a specific instance of the problem will be cited and data will be given for that instance. Many teams have felt that they ought to confine their discussion of a proposed general procedure to the Recommendations and Conclusions section, and use the Analysis section for the specific instance of the problem. However, it is not a good idea to wait until the final section of your report before you say anything at all about the primary problem you were tasked to examine! You can propose general policy (maybe even more than one) and evaluate it (them) in the Analysis section − don’t wait until the final summarizing section of your report to discuss general policy if in fact it is general policy you were asked to address.

Identify items in a list with bullets rather than numbers unless you wish to quickly refer to those items subsequently, or unless you want to emphasize their ordering (as with steps in an algorithm).

Structuring Paragraphs and Sections “Top Down”

It is impractical to provide a heading for every paragraph you write – unfortunately so, because this would give your reader another “top down” option. However, you can accomplish the next best thing by structuring your paragraphs “top down”. You do this by beginning your paragraph with a sentence or sentences that summarize what you plan to say. Subsequent sentences flesh out and provide details. For instance:

To maintain our “preferred-vendor” status, the board voted positively on two key issues: to realign departments and to continue the current hiring trend. The realignment will occur this spring, as described in Attachment

4. New personnel will include sales and marketing staff, technical consultants, IT specialists, and support staff. Requests from these departments have priority during this next hiring phase. …

Here we have underlined the initial summarizing sentence.

Fortunately, sections and subsections have titles that can be made content heavy, giving the reader another top-down option, as we have already mentioned (p. 4). However, in many cases, there is only enough room in a section title to hint at the section contents, and almost never enough room to explain why the section is important or why the reader should bother to look at it in detail. However, you can accomplish these tasks in the opening paragraph of the section, by briefly summarizing what the section contains, why you are presenting the material you do, why the material is significant, and/or how the material relates to other parts of your report. Doing so gives the reader both “top down” and “get to the point” options. Many of the sections in this document begin in this way.

Using Figures, Graphs and Tables

Figures (including graphs) and tables are among the most powerful tools you have for summarizing and conveying insight into your analysis and numerical results. They should be used in the Analysis section or its appendices. Graphs and charts are particularly useful because they can visually emphasize trends or comparisons which are hard to otherwise detect. Graphs and figures can be used to summarize key technical details which are otherwise too lengthy or cumbersome to be presented.

Figures or tables just a few lines high can simply be centered on a page with adequate space above and below. Larger figures (including graphs) and tables should be numbered consecutively and placed at the top or bottom of a page (or a separate page if they are really large). Each should have a caption of the form “Figure n:” or “Table n:” followed by a text description of the figure or table. This document contains examples of larger figures.

In graphs and charts the axes should have, to the degree that space allows, content-heavy labels; and in tables, the row and column titles should also be content-heavy, again to the degree that space allows.

Maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation

Demonstrate your familiarity with the problem

Maximize reader insight Minimize reader effort

Establish your modeling expertise

Use effective figures, graphs and tables: Space above and below. For large tables, figures or graphs: Numbered Meaningful identifying caption. Meaningful axis labels on graphs. Meaningful row or column labels on tables. Use graphs and figures to summarize technical detail. Figures and graphs in the body of the report, not in an appendix. Provide the reader Use long descriptive captions. a "top down" option

Provide the reader the option of avoiding technical detail

Figure 10: The effective use of figures, tables and graphs can greatly increase reader insight and help minimize reader effort. A sequence of figures with long descriptive captions (such as this one) can provide the reader with a top-down option for traversing your document.

Using long descriptive captions

One effective strategy for minimizing reader effort consists in designing figures with descriptive captions one to several sentences in length – that is, by using content-heavy captions. By perusing a properly designed sequence of figures, the reader can let the figures “tell the story” of your report’s contents and results. In fact, the figures in this document have been designed in this way. This "long caption" strategy therefore supplies the reader with another top-down option. The journal Interfaces and the popular magazine Scientific American use figures in this manner. Figure 11 shows an example of this strategy in an article from American Scientist.

documents produced by Word or WordPerfect. Indeed, most graphics software allows this option. Moreover, hard-copy pictures or diagrams can be scanned and inserted into documents. For example, the figures in this document were produced by embedding Visio diagrams into a Microsoft Word document, or in the case of Figure 11, by inserting a scanned image.

Using Appendices

In reports that have a substantial technical component, it is often a good idea to include one or more appendices. Again, this strategy minimizes reader effort by providing a top- down strategy and allowing him/her to avoid technical detail should he/she desire. Items that go into an appendix include:

• Background material and data. Examples include excerpts from previous studies, data previously collected by the client, and architectural drawings
• Computer input or output. A computer program or your input to a simulation or optimization package may be listed, as well as the output from such packages. However, if these are very long, they should be included on a disk instead.
• Raw data. You may wish to provide detailed tables or graphs showing the numbers that you summarized in the Analysis section of the report.
• Derivation of analytical expressions. If you took an expression from a book or article, simply citing it is enough; but it you derived the expression and it is not obvious, you should give the derivation in a appendix.
• Tedious calculations. You may not want to interrupt the readers train of thought by including, say, the details of a long present-value computation. Instead, simply say “the present value of Alternative 3 is $352,000 (see Appendix A for details)” and let the interested reader consult the appendix for the complications involving taxes, depreciation and the like.

If you have several of these items to include, put each in a separate appendix. Identify the appendices by letters A, B, C, and so forth.

Using References and Citations

A References section is not always necessary, but should be included if you cite results from books or articles. In the main text of your report, you should cite your sources in a uniform way, and in the references section, your list of references should have a uniform style. In one style, book titles may be bolded, journal articles italicized and authors names listed "last,-first". In another style, book titles might be italic, journal articles quoted, and authors names listed first-last. You can adopt any style as long as you use it consistently. There are style books in all libraries, and on the internet, but you can also adopt a style from a textbook or article. Most journals have an Instructions to Contributors section which appears annually, in which citation and reference style for that journal are described. Appendix 1 contains examples of citation and reference styles. If you use one your readers are more likely to have seen, your style will seem invisible to them.

WRITING EFFECTIVELY AT THE SENTENCE LEVEL

The entire goal of writing is to produce clear text with unambiguous meaning. Contrary to popular belief, it is not an easy task.

Your writing should be free of mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar. Blatant mistakes jar your reader out of your report to think about you − in unflattering terms. More subtle mistakes work against you more subtly – by forcing your reader to expend more effort just to understand what you meant to say (Figure 12). Good spelling, punctuation and grammar are not important in themselves. When they serve your purpose of communicating clearly the substance of your report, they are invisible.

Maximize the effectiveness of your written presentation

Demonstrate your familiarity with the problem

Maximize reader insight Minimize reader effort

Establish your modeling expertise

Avoid passive voice. Avoid dangling participles. Avoid mixing tenses. Avoid unexplained terminology or notation. Avoid ambiguous phrasing.

Avoid forcing reader to repeatedly read text for understanding

Write effectively at the sentence level:

Figure 12: The primary purpose of writing well at the sentence level is to minimize reader effort by not forcing him/her to repeatedly read text for understanding.

Avoid the passive voice

The active voice − “X did Y” − is usually preferable to the passive voice − “Y was done by X” or “Y was done.” The latter form of the passive (where you omit the agent X) is particularly dangerous because it results in ambiguity concerning the agent’s identity. In a consulting environment, both you and your client may perform actions, and sloppy use of the passive voice may obscure who is acting. For example, consider the following sentences from a hypothetical project report:

On the first day of our trip, the assembly floor was visited by team members to collect time-study data. Initially, molds were placed on a conveyor belt followed by a retail box.

Ambiguities abound here. Are we the team members who visited the assembly floor, or did the client send a team? Did the team place the molds on the conveyor, or do