Some advice on writing good progress reports for business managers.

1. ADVICE ON HOW TO PRODUCE GREAT STATUS REPORTS
Selena Sol
selena@selenasol.com
http://www.selenasol.com/selena
http://www.slideshare.net/selenasol
Because my group in the office had some success this year with defining and
executing a Comms plan, several times over the last few months, I’ve been
asked by business managers from other groups for advice on how to create
successful status / progress reports & newsletters. They are usually looking for
best practices that I can share.
Frankly, although I can certainly propose a few best-practice / tips and tricks, the
reality is that good reporting requires a mindset / organizational philosophy
change more than executing “10 best practices”.
So, in this thread, I’ll try to communicate the mindset that business managers
should be trying to help develop – and, OK, at the end, I’ll suggest a few tricks.
1. STATUS REPORTS SUCK
Nobody likes to write status reports. Common complaints include:
1. Nobody actually reads what I write
2. I don’t have time
3. I write too many reports already
If you are a business manager responsible for reporting, and you want to get the
support that you need from content providers, you must first recognize that all of
these complaints are absolutely legitimate.
1.1 Nobody reads it
You know it yourself. The reality is that many, even most, stakeholders will not
read your reports. Some just won’t have time. Some just won’t have interest. And
some have learning / communication styles that don’t benefit from reports. And
tragically, these tend to be the negatively vocal stakeholders – the ones who
reinforce the frustration felt by content providers, the ones who ask for an update
in a meeting after you have already given an update in the report that they
received yesterday – arghhhhh!
Of course, the truth is that while not everyone reads a given report, it is not true
that nobody reads it. And even if only 10% of the audience actually reads the
report, you can still get clear organizational Return on Investment (ROI) from
reporting - especially for reports that cover big, multi-million dollar projects. If only
one reader per year finds a gem that leads to a project change, or a cross-

2. divisional insight, or a risk-mitigation, the impact for the firm can be far greater
than the time-cost of reporting.
I’ll come back to this point later on, but the key to reporting ROI is to make sure
that, 1) reporting cost is minimal through process streamlining, 2) benefit per
reader is maximized by having strong, engaging, useful, targeted content and
active readership, and 3) your editorial and distribution process ensures that your
report is engaging enough so that you drive 10% readership to 12%, and then
12% to 20%, and so-on.
So while the frustration felt by report authors as a result of low readership is real,
legitimate, and unavoidable, there is a bigger, albeit subtle, picture and a very
real long-tail benefit that should not be overlooked, and can hopefully help to
ease the sense of justified frustration.
1.2 I don’t have time
You’ve got to have empathy. Our teammates really don’t have time. They are
working like mad to keep up with day-to-day firedrills and driving month-to-month
strategic deliverables – actually delivering stuff - not the cool stuff you want for
reports, but all of the gunk that makes up 85% of everyone’s day. So adding
even a 15-minute per week administrative burden is not as trivial for them as it
might seem to you.
Now, this is a particularly tough reality for business managers because your
content providers are going to be grouchy and they are going to complain about
you behind your back. Such is your life as a business manager.
All you can do are two things:
First, make the process of reporting as easy as possible, and sometimes this
means extra work for you in templating, editorial, collaborating with other report
requestors, or creating streamlined content management systems & processes.
Second, you have to buck up and live with the grouchiness. Sorry, there is no
magic pill here. You just need to have empathy and don’t take it personally when
your content providers vent at you. Their pain is real, and you probably can’t help
much.
Stay positive but persistent. Try to catch yourself when chasing invariably
transforms quietly into nagging. And this process of degradation, from chasing to
nagging, is entropic, so you’ll always, for the rest of your career, have to watch
yourself and adjust, no matter how good you get.
1. 3 Too many reports!
And finally, it is true, especially for a regional staff function (ie: CTO, COO, Risk
and Security, SCM, HR, Legal, etc) which sits within a 4-dimensional matrix of

3. stakeholders, each with very different MIS needs, that our teammates will be
stuck in a vortex of competing, semi-repetitive, but necessarily and unavoidably
slightly different reporting.
For example, in APAC, each of our heavily matrixed team members needs to
report to the 1) APAC staff organization, 2) Global staff organization, 3) Regional
BU-Aligned organization, 4) Global BU-aligned staff organization, 5) individual
project streams and 6) the Regional management. That means a minimum of 6
reports, often on different publication schedules, often with different formats, and
often with different MIS requirements and required levels of granularity. If it took
30 minutes per week to write, edit, syndicate, approve, and publish each report,
then that would be almost 1/3 of a day per week for each of your content
providers.
What’s worse is that this complex matrix of reports cannot be streamlined
because of real, unavoidable, legitimate organizational constraints. Each of the
stakeholders really does need a slightly different take on the same material
because they have different roles in the firm. And every stakeholder really cannot
change the scheduling due to dependencies. And finally, every stakeholder
needs a different format because medium and message are linked. So we’re all
stuck with it. That is why matrix management, though powerful and probably
unavoidable for a multi-national company, is expensive.
All this is to say that, at the end of the day, from the perspective of a content
provider, the one who has to write the report, status reports suck.
2. BUT STATUS REPORTS ARE REQUIRED
At the same time, if you sit down with any individual content provider over a
brew, most understand the need for status reporting, both for themselves and
their careers as well as for the team and the firm.
So, while status reports will continue to suck, there should be an understanding
that they need to get done.
In fact, there are 4 real, tangible, organizational needs that justify reporting and
which you should remind your content providers about as much as possible:
1. Compliance, audit, and governance
2. Organizational learning
3. Personal discipline
4. Marketing
2.1 Doing things right
More and more, firms need to be able to demonstrate to regulators and to
internal / external auditors that their governance and project execution are well
controlled. As a baseline, this means consistent and meaningful documentation

4. and communication. Reporting forms a minimum acceptable standard that
auditors and regulators require. Without consistent and complete reporting,
teams expose the firm to fines, or worse.
Any auditor’s first port of call will be communication and decision-making
mechanisms. And this makes sense. If one understands the core function of
good corporate governance and controls, it is easy to understand why regulators
and auditors are looking for this collateral. Proper reporting is key to a mature
organization’s ability to do, to decide, to reflect, and to learn (think CMM,
TOGAF, PMBOK, CoBIT, etc).
Reporting is one of a few foundational mediums needed to create and foster
conversations – they are a mechanism to drive accountability and allow
opportunities for stakeholders to challenge. Without reports, inter-organizational
teams are blind, uncoordinated, and prone to bad group-level decision-making.
Of course, this is not to say that team meetings, townhalls, enterprise social
networks, or other mediums are not also required. Good conversations in any
organizational require a multi-media approach to reflect the diversity of learning
styles and interests of stakeholders.
But at the end of the day, reports must be in place as a baseline control.
Reporting is just a part of doing a good job these days. It is not something ‘extra’.
2.2 Organizational Learning
But communication is not just about accountability and decision-making.
Perhaps more importantly, communication is about making the organization more
effective by facilitating information flow and maintaining organizational memory,
independent of people.
The velocity and quality of information flowing through an organization’s veins is
a powerful predictor of innovation, cross-silo efficiency (leveraging) and
effectiveness (synergy), client focus, employee engagement, and ‘network’
effectiveness.
Simply put, the more we share, the more creative, empowered, and smart we are
in our jobs, and the happier we are doing them.
But, and we’ll talk more about this later, turning communication into
conversations requires active effort from the reporters and the readers. If we
lecture to a sleeping lecture theatre, then we lose a significant portion of potential
value. Reporting only works effectively if we have active and engaged readers.
2.3 Personal Discipline

5. Listen, writing a report is kind’ve like eating your veggies and doing those 20
more sit-ups. It’s annoying and unpleasant, but we all have this deep-down
realization that we need to do it because it makes us more healthy.
Reporting makes us more healthy because, when done right, it forces us to
reflect.
Reporting requires that we take a moment to pause from doing and ask
ourselves critical questions like, “Of all the things I am doing, what actually
matters the most? Am I spending my time on those things, or on other, perhaps
less important, things? Who are the stakeholders (readers) that I am working for?
Is what I am doing aligned to their goals or have I accidentally strayed? How can
I explain what I am doing to someone who might need to know, but who currently
doesn’t know anything about what I am doing?”
Reflection is key to being a human because once sufficiently fed, animals need
to learn. I caution against an organizational philosophy that says, “Don’t waste
time reporting. Just get on with it!” People cannot simply do. They need to
reflect. They need to reflect.
Now, that does not mean that people become reporting machines, chugging out
volumes of bullet points. But it does mean that some reporting is good. Without
it, and I know you know this is true, we would get caught up in the firedrills and
fail to take time to reflect. As a result, we’d be much less effective as individuals
or as a firm.
2.4 Marketing
Last, but certainly not least, like it or not, all organizations are political
environments. As such, marketing becomes a key tool in developing a team or
developing an individual’s organizational power and opportunities for expansion
or for developing an individual’s career.
When people ask the inevitable question, “So what has team X done for the
business lately,” whether it is time for promotions & compensations or time for
retrenchments, you want to hear loud and consistent cries of, “they are busy
doing meaty, meaningful, mission-critical things” from the throng.
While good stakeholder management is much more than reports, good reports
are a key tool in the activity, especially when it comes to secondary or tertiary
stakeholders.
Now, just a note. Be careful that reports do not become a justification for
employment. We’ll discuss this later, but “good’ reports are the starting points (or
continuations) of great conversations with stakeholders. I’d rather have a content
provider give me 3 really interesting sentences rather than a whole slew of

6. meaningless page-filling bullets. It is perfectly fine for reports to be short, so long
as they are sweet. It is never about quantity of items.
Finally, from a less Machiavellian perspective, reporting is also important
because it allows you to drive out messages, make sure that your function is
understood, solicit feedback, engage the larger firm, and attract collaboration.
Especially for a team like CTO which is almost always misunderstood, reporting
affords the opportunity to make the team real and tangible to all the other teams
out there beavering away at their little corner of the universe. When people
understand you, not only are they less threatened, but they understand when to
engage you and they feel more encouraged to do so.
3. GIVEN ALL THIS, HOW DOES A BUSINESS MANAGER GET GOOD
REPORTS?
At this point, I hope it is clear that while seemingly sucky, reports are necessary,
even, dare I say, good, for an organization. So the real question is how do we
achieve “good” reporting?
Returning to a point made above, good reports are all about Return on
Investment. If we were analyzing the ROI of a business, we’d say:
Profit = Revenue - Cost.
In the case of reporting ROI, maybe we can say,
Value = Benefit – Cost
In addition, if we understand Cost as Cost to Produce + Cost to Distribute + Cost
to Consume, then we have:
Value = Benefit – (CP + CD +CC)
Further, if Cost to Produce is actually the Cost to Write plus the Cost to Rewrite
(as needed) across each content providers plus the Cost to Edit and Cost to
Format and the Cost to Manage the whole production process for the editor, we
have:
Value = Benefit – [(Σ(CW + CR) + [(CE + CF + CM) + CD + CC]]
Then, if Cost to Consume includes all the consumers, you would have:
Value = Benefit – [(Σ(CW + CR) + [(CE + CF + CM) + CD +(Σ(CC))]
Now, if we also understand Benefit as a function of quality and a function of
relevance across the summation of all the report consumers, we then have:
Value = Σ[f(Q) * f(R)] – [(Σ(CW + CR) + (CE + CF + CM)) + CD +(Σ(CC))]

7. Once you understand this basic formula, you should have a good idea of what
you need to do as a business manager. That is what I meant when I said earlier
that good reporting is a philosophy, not a collection of best practices. As a
business manager, there is no best way to get good reporting. The goal is to
optimize the formula above, and the method depends on your context as the
variables in the formula will depend on your situation.
As such, as a business manager hoping to get high reporting value, you need to
be optimizing the following variables:
Σ (1) & Σ (3) The total number of content consumers is a balance between
value and cost. You need to find the right balance that gives you
maximum returns.
f(Q) Quality of submissions. The contributions follow business writing
best practices
f(R) Content is relevant. It is written at the right granularity, with the
right amount of detail and cover strategically aligned content that
drives good conversations and decision making
Σ (2) The total number of content providers should be minimal while
still achieving quality and relevance
CW The Cost to Write is minimal
CR Cost to Rewrite is minimal
CE Cost to Edit is minimal
CF Cost to Format is minimal
CM Cost to Manage is minimal
CD Cost to Distribute is minimal
CC Cost to Consume is minimal
However, as promised, I have a few ideas from our experience in APAC CTO
that may, or may not, be of value. 
1. Report readers must be active
2. Editors must add value
3.1 Report readers must be active
From my experience, and this is a hard truth for an organization and its leaders,
the reason most reporting is bad is because the readers, not the writers, are lazy
and passive.
Imagine that you are in a conference room, laying your heart and soul on the
table, going through a presentation that you worked hard to complete about a
project that reflects a good chunk of your time at work. Now imagine that as you
speak, everyone in the room is busily tip tapping on their smart phones, totally
ignoring you, at least seemingly. How would you feel? How well would you
prepare for the next presentation?

8. Well, reports are the same. If the audience is silent and unengaged, report
writers will quickly disengage as well.
So if you tell me that you are having a hard time getting your teammates to
submit content for a report, I will tell you to stop pestering your team, and instead
give your team manager a smack on the back of the head – because the
problem probably lies there.
If management wants good reporting, managers must visibly and consistently
make reporting a priority. Here are some good ways to do so…
1. Leaders should make good reporting a formal, compable, objective
of every individual on the team. It may be a small % of everyone’s
comp, but it needs to be recognized as a priority in people’s formal
objectives, and it needs to be part of the comp discussions at the end of
the year. At the end of the day, people are fairly simple creatures. They
need to know in black and white terms that reporting is a priority and they
need to see that the organization is not just paying lip service to the idea.
2. Leaders should hold middle managers accountable for the quality of
their reports. I’m not personally a big fan of scolding those who don’t
deliver. Instead, good reports need to be publically praised, often.
Leaders should be publicizing good reports because it re-clarifies what
we’re all trying to achieve with practical, tangible examples of what a good
report looks like. It also makes the authors feel really great and motivated
to continue doing things right. Note also that the publicizing activity needs
to be done in the trenches, with content providers, not just with middle
management.
3. Middle managers should actively challenge. There needs to be a
review process that is executed religiously. During this review process,
every week, middle management should be sending updates back to
authors for clarification / improvement. Content providers need to be
reminded month-to-month not to slip into triviality or bureaucracy. Middle
management should be responsible for messaging and a consistent team
voice and needs to take its editorial role seriously.
4. Leaders need to listen and ask smart, informed questions. It’s not
just about proving that reports are being read, and we don’t want to turn
this into a time-consuming inquisition. But the purpose of reporting is a
conversation that leads to a more honed, strategically-aligned operation.
That conversation must be two way or it doesn’t work. Leaders and other
stakeholders need to play their parts by reading reports critically and
reaching out to use the information.

9. 5. Leaders and managers should personally forward, liberally. Of
course, the report in question will be sent to stakeholders as part of the
standard process of syndication. However, to reinforce the import, and to
facilitate a more meaningful discussion, leaders and managers should be
personally forwarding the report, with commentary, to relevant individuals
who might not have read the report the first time around (cc’ing relevant
content providers). We need to respect the fact that in today’s information
ocean, it is natural that people put up barriers to protect against
organizational SPAM. A personal approach such as, “Hey John, I wanted
to draw your attention to the 2nd bullet in Section 2. Is this something you
can help with?” has dramatic power to break through the natural defenses
against email that lead to the false negative habit of “delete without
reading”.
In short, don’t ask for a report unless you are prepared to spend the time
required to engage and make use of it in a dialog.
3.2 Editors must add value
As the business manager, it is your job to make sure that the leaders, managers
and other stakeholders reading reports are critically digesting them and engaging
in meaningful discourse as a result. For that to work, you cannot allow yourself to
become a nag to content providers or a mailman to stakeholders. You need to
be a conversation facilitator.
In that role, you have a few important tasks:
1. Edit, cull, and challenge. The business manager is the immediate editor.
Far from being a dumb collator, the business manager is the on-the-
ground shepherd of the team’s messages. In this role, business
managers should be making choices about what is publish-worthy and
what is inappropriate as well as what is ready for prime time and what
requires another round of word-smithing. If a content provider submits a
report that doesn’t make sense to you or doesn’t have a clear value, send
it back and ask for a better update.
2. Be clear about quality expectations. You should publish your
expectations for the team and include examples of good reports as
reference material. The key comms messages should be defined in a
publically available Comms Plan that includes a description of
stakeholders and an analysis of what we want those stakeholders to
“think, feel, and do” as a result of our communications with them. If
possible, make sure you send all of your content providers to a good
business writing class.

10. That said, although I think everyone should be fluent in business writing
techniques, my personal view is that content providers can write “well
enough” by just following 2 simple rules:
1) Make sure that you report only what really matters. Create
conversations that need to happen in the organization. Don’t fill up the
slide with bullets to prove that you are working hard. Explicitly explain
why the reader should care about the update. Reference actual
business value.
2) Assume readers have no idea of what you are talking about, Avoid
acronyms and take a bit of time to explain basic background so that
the update is stand-alone.
Oh, one more thing. As a business manager, you should be a master of
business writing and editorial yourself. Buy a book, go on a course, just
master the art and craft (98% craft) of good business writing. It’s not
actually that hard.
3. Remove barriers. For one, have a clear, transparent, and unchanging
schedule and format. People need to plan around communication. They
need to juggle other communications streams, they need to schedule time
to syndicate with the right people, and they may be so far downstream
from you that you don’t even know they are doing this! Same goes for
reporting templates. If possible, remove style sheet decisions so content
providers need only worry about text and can repurpose their text without
a bunch of formatting work. Remember, your job is to remove barriers.
Take away anything you find that gets in the way of fluid conversations.
4. Be patient and positive, but persistent. People are going to miss
deadlines, forget about you, not read the comms plan, ask FAQ questions
despite the big FAQ link on the team reporting website, get cranky, slip
quickly into trivial bullets, and do any number of other fairly frustrating
things. Give them a break. They are human and they are really, really,
really busy. At the same time, don’t let your content providers push you
around. Make sure that they know that the best way to get you to stop
chasing them is just to deliver the work. And, be very careful with name
and shame. Use it only when it is absolutely necessary as it is a powerful
weapon that can easily backfire.
Alright, that’s all I’ve got to say for the moment. Remember, it is not about any
particular tip or trick, but about a change in mindset that involves more than just
you. Good luck.