Week 3 Course Connect: Lesson 8: Introduction to Business Reports and Proposals

Week 3 Course Connect: Lesson 8: Introduction to Business Reports and Proposals

OVERVIEW

Whenever the job of producing a company report falls upon you, it’s your chance to demonstrate your understanding of the situation in which your company’s doing business, of the people you work with, and of the goals your company holds dear. It’s your chance to shine. So how well you present yourself and your company within the context of a report, especially when it holds true to prescribed guidelines, policies, procedures, and formats, can establish your true value in the eyes of your peers.

This can probably make you nervous. All eyes are on you and everything hinges upon how well you pull this off. What can help you do this is the realization that report writing is commonplace and ordinary, and as a result, you can follow a commonplace and ordinary pattern for planning and producing reports that is simple to understand and easy to master.

An effective report or proposal can get the boss’s attention, help the company make sound decisions, or secure a lucrative contract. Companies rely on reports to maintain inventory, develop and market new products, stay competitive, identify and satisfy customer needs, and manage employee relationships. Proposals present new ideas or solutions and help companies secure contracts for work. Writing reports and proposals does not have to be frustrating, boring, or overwhelming. A simple procedure can guide your writing, break it into manageable steps, and help you communicate the final product effectively to your audience, whether it’s inside or outside the company.

TOPICS

Topic 1: Three-Step Process for Writing Reports and Proposals

Writing a report includes clarifying the problem, defining the purpose, and creating a work plan.

There are a handful of classes of reports you may be called upon to write, or which you may take the initiative to write on behalf of your company. Informational reports present data in a clear, concise manner with graphic detail, withholding all opinion and recommendations, and letting the facts speak for themselves. Analytical reports offer information and analysis that break down the data to look for insightful trends and patterns. Proposals typically include analytical data as well, but it’s used as background for a persuasive argument you make in favor of a change to existing policies or procedures, or a new project or course of business.

Reports and proposals may require extra time and attention during the planning step, because regardless of whether your end product include analysis or recommendations, you’ll need to analyze the data and information you include anyway for relevance.

Categories of Reports:

No matter what kind of report you’re producing—a one-page report that follows a standard format or a detailed business plan—view every business report as an opportunity.

Report writing is a chance to demonstrate your understanding of your audience’s challenges; if done well, your report can contribute to your organization’s success.

Reports fall into three categories:

Analyzing the Situation:

The writing process for reports and proposals is the same as for letters, memos, and e-mail messages: plan, write, and complete. However, the emphasis on various tasks within these three steps can vary considerably.

This lesson addresses the planning step, focusing on two major areas that require special attention in long documents:

Gathering information
Organizing information

Organizing the Information:

When organizing the information, you will want to:
Define your main idea
Limit your scope
Select a direct or an indirect approach
Outline your content

Choose the Approach:

In deciding which approach to take with your report, you must gauge how receptive your audience will be to the information presented. The direct approach is most convenient for business reports, because it:

Saves time and makes the rest of the report easier to follow
Produces a stronger report

There are, however, some drawbacks to the direct approach. The confidence implied by the direct approach can be misconstrued as arrogance, especially if you are a junior member of an organization that values status and moving up the ranks.

The indirect approach allows you to prove your points and overcome your audience’s reservations gradually. The longer the message, though, the less effective the indirect approach will be.

Both direct and indirect approaches have merit. You might want to combine direct and indirect approaches in your report, revealing conclusions and recommendations as you go through the report, rather than putting them first or last.

1) Choose the Approach:

Saves time and makes the rest of the report easier to follow
Produces a stronger report

The indirect approach allows you to prove your points and overcome your audience’s reservations gradually. The longer the message, though, the less effective the indirect approach will be.

2) Using Reliable Information:

As you have probably discovered while doing projects for school, research involves a lot more than simply typing a few terms into a search engine. The Internet can be a tremendous source of business information; public or university libraries are also an excellent resource.

Good research results from following a clear process:
Plan your research
Locate data and information
Process data and information
Apply your findings
Manage your information

role research played in the development of Toyota's Scion

Teachers are close observers of children. Through observations, they learn ways to provide additional experiences to enhance children's learning. For example, Bethany realizes that for children to gain a deeper understanding of animal behavior, they need to have additional opportunities to study hamsters and to discuss and reflect on their behavior. Bethany decides to bring a pair of hamsters into the classroom. The children help to establish a habitat for the hamsters and to care for them. Bethany supplies journals for the children so they can draw their observations. The children share their journals and observations during circle time. Their active hands-on engagement with the hamsters allows them to develop questions and theories about the hamsters that they can then test, such as determining what foods hamsters prefer to eat.
Bethany also helps the children to tie their learning to bigger ideas, such as: What do animals need for survival? Do humans also need these same things? Helping children to make these connections is another important role of the teacher.

REVIEW

To plan a report, first analyze the situation by clarifying the problem, defining your purpose, developing an audience profile, and creating a work plan. Every report has a statement of purpose that clearly explains why it was written and what will be delivered. For example, a statement of purpose might be: To identify potential markets that are not being addressed by our current products.

The work plan states your defined purpose, the scope of your investigation, and your resource requirements in carrying it out. It also reviews project assignments, schedules, and resources, and lists follow-up plans for after the report has been delivered or presented.

During the research phase, use reliable, credible information and apply only relevant findings. Consider your audience’s needs when selecting the medium to present your report or proposal. Then organize information to define the main idea, limit the scope, select an approach, and outline the content.

Topic 2: Performing Research

Research must reveal all of the information necessary for your report, using multiple sources that corroborate one another.

Not every report you write will necessarily be persuasive, although proposals will be an exception. In every case, you’ll be researching facts and relevant data. With an informational report, there is no point or argument that you’re trying to make, so you should refrain from presenting only a portion of the data as though you were trying to illuminate some unseen point that you’d be making if this were a proposal. With an analytical report, while it’s important only to show relevant data, you don’t want to omit data that doesn’t contribute to the conclusion you intend to reach. In fact, if you start your analysis research with a conclusion, you’re going the wrong direction anyway.

Research should always be a meticulous process. You may be conducting interviews and acquiring data from multiple sources, as well as backing up your findings with existing evidence.

Plan Your Research

Familiarize yourself with the subject of your report so that you can frame some insightful questions and plan your research well. You can achieve this by reading industry publications, visiting competitor websites, interviewing experts within your organization, conducting an online search, and scanning the contents and indexes of books on the subject.

As you explore, develop a problem statement that will define the purpose of your research.

Identify the most critical gaps in your information (the difference between what you currently know and what you need to know).

Prioritize your information needs and concentrate on the most vital questions. With a prioritized list of questions, you are almost ready to delve into your research. Can you think of what else you might need to do at this time?

Verify the Ethics

To avoid ethical lapses in your research, keep the following points in mind:
Don’t force a specific outcome by skewing your research.
Respect the privacy of your research participants.
Document sources and give appropriate credit.
Respect the intellectual property and digital rights of your sources.
Don’t extract more from your sources than they actually provide.

Locate Data and Information

Research performed for reports takes two basic forms—primary and secondary.

Primary research is new research done specifically for your project. It includes interviews, surveys, observations, document analyses, and experiments.

Research materials created previously for another purpose are considered secondary research.

Secondary information includes data that have already been collected and analyzed, such as public websites, online and print periodicals, books, newspapers, magazines, and other reports.

Before you use secondary sources in your report, you must confirm that they are reliable.

Evaluate Sources

Evaluate sources by verifying the quality of the sources used in your research. If you have any doubt about a source’s authenticity, don’t use it. Separate credible sources from suspect ones by asking these questions:

Does the source have a reputation for honesty and reliability?
Is the source potentially biased?
What is the purpose of the source material?
Is the author credible?
Where did the source get its information?
Can you verify the material independently?
Is the material current and complete?

Research: Conduct Secondary Research

You will likely begin most projects with secondary research that comes from either inside or outside the company. When looking for secondary information in the library, your choices of materials include the following:

Using the Internet and Search Engines

Finding primary and secondary sources for your research is made more possible by utilizing the Internet, various search engines, or alternative research methods. Discover more about each of these methods here.

Research: Document Your Secondary Sources

Proper documentation of the sources used for your research serves three important functions:

1. It properly and ethically credits the person who created the original material.

2. It shows your audience that you have sufficient support for your message.

3. It helps your readers explore your topic in more detail if desired.

You must document your source using proper citations.

Note that it is not necessary to document general knowledge or specialized knowledge that is generally known among your readers. Specialized knowledge is information that is well known to the likely readers of the report. For example, if you are writing a report to biochemists, you do not need to explain biochemical information that most biochemists would know.

Research: Conduct Primary Research

So, you’ve conducted extensive secondary research for your report, but you’re still lacking some necessary information and insights. What do you do next?

You gather the information yourself by performing primary research. Common methods of primary research include surveying people and conducting interviews.

A well-planned and conducted survey can provide valuable insights, but only if it is reliable (it produces identical results when repeated) and valid (it measures what it is intended to measure).

Research: Primary Research that is Valid and Reliable

To generate results from your primary research that are both reliable and valid, you need to choose research participants carefully. The biggest difficulty in choosing your participants is getting a representative sample of the entire population in question.

The online surveys on many websites potentially suffer from the same sampling bias; they capture only the opinions of people who visit the sites and are willing to participate. These people are likely not a representative sample of the population.

You also need to develop an effective set of questions. To develop an effective questionnaire that will produce reliable and valid results, use these guidelines:

Start with the prioritized information gaps you identified at the beginning of the research process.
Break those points into specific questions, choosing an appropriate type of question for each point.
Provide clear instructions.
Don’t ask for information that people can’t be expected to remember.
Keep the questionnaire short and easy to answer.
Ask questions that will get answers that are easy to analyze.
Avoid leading and ambiguous questions that could bias your survey.
Ask only one question at a time.

Preparing and Using Interviews

Getting relevant, in-depth information straight from an expert is a good way of collecting primary information.

Planning an Interview:

Unless you’re news anchor Katie Couric or correspondent Mike Wallace, you, as the interviewer, must do some careful planning to get the best results and make the best use of the other person’s (the interviewee’s) time.

To plan an effective interview analyze your purpose, learn about the interviewee, formulate your main idea, and decide on the length, style, and organization of the interview.

Conducting an Interview

To conduct a successful interview, it is often a good idea to provide a list of questions to the interviewee a day or two before the interview. If you want to record the interview, ask the person ahead of time for his or her permission.

The answers to interview questions are influenced by the types of questions you ask, the way you ask them, and your subject’s cultural and language background.

During an interview, ask both open-ended and close-ended questions. Open-ended questions invite the expert to offer opinions, insights, and information. For example, begin your questions with “Why do you think” or “Why do you believe.” Closed-ended questions elicit a specific answer, such as yes or no.

Reviewing an Interview

When the interview is over and your memory is fresh, write down your thoughts, review your notes, and organize the material you collected. Look for important themes, helpful facts or statistics, and direct quotes.

Face-to-face interviews allow you to gauge the interviewee’s reactions to questions and observe nonverbal cues. Email interviews give your subject a change to think through responses thoroughly.

Research: Process Data and Information

After you’ve collected all the necessary secondary and primary information, the next step is converting it into the specific content you need. This step can involve analyzing numbers; quoting, paraphrasing, or summarizing text; drawing conclusions; and making recommendations.

Business research often produces numerical data—sales and financial figures, survey results, and population statistics, to name a few. For those who feel numerically challenged, you can relax. You can use simple arithmetic to gain insight from sets of research data.

Research: Analyze Data

The table on the right shows the insights you can extract about a collection of numbers.

The mean (or average) is the sum of all the items in the group divided by the number of items.

The median is the midpoint of an ordered series (with an equal number of items above and below).