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Discover the purpose of your report or proposal (hint: talk with your boss)

When you're asked to create a report or proposal, you almost certainly need to ask your leader more about what they want.

If you're in charge of creating a report, or a proposal, or any of the other documents we work on, then chances are that this is happening:

– Your boss or client has a challenge.

– You've been asked to deal with it.

– And you have a broad, general, slightly fuzzy idea of what they probably need.

At this point, many people conclude that they had better best give the boss what they think the boss needs.

We have learnt through long and sometimes bitter experience that this first reaction is usually wrong.

You've reached Report Challenge A: The challenge of discovering what question(s) your document should answer. Because you probably don't really know yet. Not deeply. Not enough to justify leaping into an expensive, time-consuming report-authoring process.

You need to find out what you're really being asked to do.

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Researcher and advisor Professor Paul Cairney notes that for people who are used to the sort of work done in places like universities, this more practical approach can be a challenge:

“The kind of caricature of a researcher is: they ask their own research question; they produce their own research, and then at the end, they think about who else would be interested in this and they do some recommendations.

“Whereas I think the art to writing policy reports is, you start from the other direction. Who is either my client or my audience? What are their beliefs or interests? What will catch their attention? What are their expectations? And how can I tailor what I do to fit with what they are doing?”

And of course, when you're writing a report, your critical audience can be as small as a single human being – often, your boss, or a group of people above you on the org chart..

Helping your boss explain what they need

Here's your boss's problem. The organisation has opportunities to grasp and problems to solve, and to get them all dealt with, your boss needs to point people right at them.

And of course, then the leader has to tell people what sort of report or proposal they need to produce. That may sound easy, but it isn't. It takes surprising amounts of work and expertise. It requires a leader to think about their needs and those of other people in a ruthlessly structured way, to listen to others' needs, to understand how your organisation and society work now and imagine what they could be in five years' time, and to set other people's expectations. And they you have to take that thinking and put it into a form that people can absorb and understand when you communicate it to them.

And a leader can move a long way up the organisational ladder without really being good at these tasks.

So, as odd as it sounds, you may have to help your boss tell you about the report they want you to write.

This process can be confronting – for you, and also for the leader involved. After all, your boss is busy. They want their question answered; they don't necessarily want to sit down for an hour and talk about it with you.

But this discovery process is essential to success. This is why Shorewalker DMS stresses the discovery process.

This challenge exists in many fields; software engineers, for example, call it requirements-gathering, and it can take much longer than the work of actually writing the software. But just as in software creation and other fields, defining what you need to do to deliver a successful report is vital that succces.

Understanding the assignment can make or break your report

John Daley is an independent strategy and policy advisor who founded Australia's Grattan Institute and made it Australia's leading public policy think-tank. (See our podcast with him on giving your decision-makers the report they need.) He doesn't just argue that you should find out how to answer the right questions; he says this is the first of three tasks that will make or break your report.

“In terms of asking the right question, it's always worth, I think, spending quite a lot of time with the person who is commissioning the report, talking to them about: what do they really care about, what's their understanding of the problem, and being prepared to go back to them and say: ‘You think that your question is x, but actually I think your question is something slightly different, because this slightly different thing is, in fact, going to solve your real life problem, even though that's not necessarily how you might have characterised it to start with.’

“And that process – of really sitting with someone and understanding what problem are they trying to solve and getting clarity on it – takes longer than most people think.

“But it's really worth the investment. Because if you get that wrong, or you don't get it quite right, then you wind up either doing a lot of work that you didn't need to do, or not doing a lot of work that you should have done. So that's part one, get the right question.

“There's a lovely sort of one-page format that McKinsey used to use around the problem statement that was aimed at getting clarity around the question. I found it a really useful framework.

“One of the most important parts of that framework was getting clarity about what was out of scope. So write down the things that, as you've heard it, you don't need to worry about. And make sure that the person who's commissioning it agrees that those indeed are the things that are out of scope. And that to-and-fro about what's in and out of scope, I think, can be really helpful.”

The appointment(s) with your boss

So you need to ask your boss for a meeting. And at that meeting, you need to get answers to several questions that will guide the rest of your project. You will need to find out what they think about these issues:

  • Why are we doing the project? What problem are we really trying to solve?
  • What are the must-answer questions?
  • Who is the audience? Who is going to take notice of the report? Who will read the executive summary; who will read further?
  • What are the dimensions of the problem that worry you most?
  • Have we tried to solve this problem before – and if so, how did we fail?
  • How dramatically can we suggest changing the organisations to achieve this goal?
  • In our solution, what's the maximum budget can we suggest is expended?
  • What must we assume and cannot change?
  • What questions should we not consider – that is, what is out of scope?
  • Are you happy for me to come back every few weeks, run past you our evolving thinking, and get your reaction? (The answer should be "yes". If it's "no" ... well, that's beyond the scope of this article.) 

As Daley notes, this process often takes longer than most people think, especially if you're going to do it right. As Daley also notes, a good process will also build in those subsequent meetings where you run your evolving thinking past your boss and get their reaction. Daley explains the stakes this way: “The last thing you want is to go away for four months and then kind of come back with a finished report that’s actually probably going to be useless.”

Work with reports and proposals experts

At Shorewalker DMS, we can help you to clarify what your report or proposal needs. We help you identify the goals for your report, the elements it needs to reach those goals, and the right ways to deliver those elements.