Pyramid report writing

Report writing is an important activity in any large organization where projects span space and time. I was told once that the work doesn't exist until it's been documented. Trouble is, not very many people do it well. Without claiming any particular insight, I did receive one piece of advice from a senior coworker once on how to structure reports.

Most reports can be viewed in three sections of equal importance and unequal detail. The two pyramids below show the three sections in terms of Detail and Readers.

• Section 1 - Usually called the executive summary, it's the only part that most people are going to read. Put your key points, but don't worry about detail. Most people just don't really care.
• Section 2 - The body of your report contains some detail. Describe what's going on so that a peer can know enough to agree with your conclusions. A few people will read this, mostly folks that you specifically ask to.
• Section 3 - Appendices. This is where all the detail goes. The only person who will ever read this besides you is the sucker who has to pick up the project again in 3 years and doesn't want to start from scratch.

I realized that once I started writing like this, my reports got better and faster. Better because I put the right level of detail in the right places so readers didn't have to wade through trivia to find what they wanted. Faster because there's less need to make sure the entire report is linguistically perfect. In the end, everybody's happier.

Give it a try and let me know what you think.