Consulting Journal: Writing - How detailed should your reports be?

Writing: How detailed should your reports be?

by David Blakey

If your clients want short reports with only bullet points, should that be what you give them?

[Monday 23 July 2001]

Consultants have to prepare reports to their clients. Basically, the reports will present the consultants' conclusions and recommendations. Often, they will include the evidence for the conclusions and the justification for the recommendations. The consultants' reports may include some history of the client's business, a description of the current situation and some future projections for business. Some reports include outlines of the recommended actions - ‘executive summaries’ - and the background to the consulting assignment and even the terms of reference for the consultants. What is included in your reports to your clients? And what should be included or excluded?

A good starting point for the contents of your reports is what your client wants. Note that I say ‘starting point’. Clients may say that they just want a set of bullet points for your conclusions and another set of bullet points for your recommendations. You should then consider whether anything more is actually needed and put forward a good case to your clients for its inclusion.

Here's why. We'll call the client ‘Anna’. Anna needs to make a presentation to her board of directors. The presentation must be short and simple. It should show:

your conclusions as bullet points;
where the current situation is unsatisfactory;
what improvements you recommend; and
the costs and durations for these improvements.

The obvious answer is to present your report to Anna as a slide presentation, using her company's presentation software. This is what many consultants actually do. Their reports to their clients are often a few PowerPoint slides. The report to Anna would be between four and eight slides.

Before we continue, let's look at how you would build Anna's report.

However you were presenting the report, you would still conduct the same amount of research and information gathering. You would still apply the same tools and techniques and methodologies to extrapolate from this information to potential future situations. You would still apply your skills and knowledge and experience to develop recommendations. In short, just because the final report was intended to be four to eight slides instead of a hundred pages of text, there would be no economy in preparing the contents of the final report.

For a ‘full’ text report, the evidence and the justifications would be included, and the raw data and calculations would be shown. There could be perceived economies in preparing a ‘short’ slide report, as these would not be included, but they would still have to be documented on the consultant's files in some other form than original rough notes. (Or, at least, they should. Consultants who attempt to avoid documenting all their data risk litigation if they cannot demonstrate the path that they have taken from raw data to conclusions.)

Now, if all of this work is being done, and if the client is paying for it to be done, there is little additional work involved in preparing and presenting both forms of report.

My tips

So, here are my tips for dealing with short, simple reports presented as slides.

Inform your client that all of the background work will still have to be done, and is included in the price, and that this work includes documenting the data, the processes and the methods used.
State that producing a full textual report will involve little additional cost to the client. If you can, give an estimate for that cost, which can be seen in relation to the overall assignment cost.
Point out that there may be a need to produce the justification for the short report, and that it will be easier, faster and cheaper to do this during the assignment rather than to do it as a separate, subsequent assignment.
If your client still only wants the short report, then document this discussion in a letter, so that you can demonstrate that you have not been negligent.

While it is true that people may want to see the ‘bottom line’ in a few slides, you should be able to demonstrate that you performed competently. Producing the traditional ‘bulk’ gives everyone involved all the information they need or may need.

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