Kill Your Reports
Most people picture international work as feeding hungry people, providing health care to refugees, or building schools. In reality, it makes no sense to pay an expatriate to do that. Instead, we do what cannot be hired locally: English-language paperwork. We write reports to HQ and donors, proposals, and program guidelines. We write even more reports. We can go days without seeing anybody who is helped by our work.
Owen:
It seems to me that we must de-escalate the amount of paperwork involved in international development. There has to be some record-keeping to enable us to account to the people whose money we are spending. But the bureaucracy involved in designing and getting funding for projects, for hiring people, and for monitoring and reporting, has become an industry in itself.
All true. The ECB research showed clearly that while nearly every expat staff member – and many of the senior national staff – in an international organisation is required to contribute to situation reporting, donor reporting, co-ordination reporting and so forth, precisely none of them believed that the reporting process added value to their work.
Agreed that reporting has become an industry in itself, as Owen says – but why? Cui bono? The beneficiary of these reporting processes is headquarters (sometimes regional offices) – the senior management and support staff in the organisation. Now this wouldn’t be an issue if we could demonstrate that their receipt of reports had a positive impact on the organisation’s work in the field.
Yet time and again, it seems there is no such impact. Country offices receive little or no feedback on their reports, and individual staff receive none. It’s also hard to identify any link between the reports that are generated in-country and any strategic decision-making, although it’s clear that there is some benefit there. This is a tremendous problem – a waste of money and time in situations (especially emergencies) where those resources are at an absolute premium.
There’s no single solution to this problem, but there are a few strategies you can adopt.
- Cut reporting to the bare minimum, in terms of both frequency and length.
- Revise reporting processes so that they add value to the staff tasked with doing that reporting.
- Develop multiple reports from single processes, rather than having multiple (and redundant) processes.
- Make use of new technology to cut down on traditional narrative reporting in favour of (for example) SMS flash reporting.
I’ve been advocating these approaches for years now, with almost no impact – organisations are wedded to the idea that reporting is an intrinsic part of their work, rather than a tool that can be optimised. If there’s one critical step every organisation should take, though, it’s that individual reports must be linked clearly with specific decisions that need to be made within the organisation. If the information in a report is not going to be used to make a decision, then why are we asking staff for that information?
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[...] Kill Your Reports [...]
jra’s thoughts › HQ folks: Don’t Do This
31 Oct 08 at 16:20
The sector has been trying for decades to behave in an accountable way, and reporting is a part of that. I suspect the real problem is that reports are not read.
Reports should also be made available for subsequent projects. That means they should be archived online with lots of metadata. Organisations serious about accountability might also make their reports public.
Matthew Slater
31 Oct 08 at 17:19
A word of warning based on personal experience; if you have the courage to refuse to contribute to the glut of unread reports you will quickly become unpopular. Your supervisor has to write her own superfluous reports and will want to be able to prove that she did so after receiving (but not reading) your report. She’ll worry that if she doesn’t get your report and anything goes wrong she’ll be blamed for failing to make you report. Obviously if you had written the report it would have averted disaster.
I swear many organizations measure success by the volume of paper generated.
Kevin Toomer
1 Nov 08 at 2:19
One more thing: If you inherit a position that involves writing numerous superfluous reports continue writing them but add these lines to the end of each report – “In order to decrease the load on our overburdened servers and reduce the volume of unread email we are seeking feedback on the usefulness of this reports. If you find this report useful and would like to continue to receive it please send us an email. If you do not respond we will consider this an indication that you no longer find the report useful and have stopped reading it.”
For each separate report do this two or three times in succession. Then stop sending the report to anyone who doesn’t reply. If no one replies stop writing that particular report.
I’ve done this several times in the past and can attest that it reduces the number of reports you need to write. Of course if anyone complains you can refer them back to your previous request for feedback and their lack of response.
Kevin Toomer
1 Nov 08 at 4:40
Matt – that’s the internal conflict that I have. I realise that reports are used for evaluation – in fact, consultants working on evaluations are often the main consumers of reports. How do we strike a balance between good practice in knowledge management, and cutting down on the amount of superfluous “paperwork”?
Paul Currion
1 Nov 08 at 7:01
Kevin – absolutely. I’ve often had the feeling that one of the primary purposes of situation reporting is to make HQ feel that they’re more involved than they actually are. They can read the report, ask questions in the teleconference and tell their colleagues all the news – whether that has any impact on the project itself isn’t really relevant.
Your strategy for cutting down on reporting sounds effective, but you’ll probably get cut from their christmas card list in return…
Paul Currion
1 Nov 08 at 7:04
@Matslats – This would also depends on whether you can actually trust the information in reports. In the “accountability through bureaucracy” model, is there really any motivation not to cover up or omit to mention the things you do wrong?
@Paul – Did ECB come up with a sensible alternative to the excessively extractive form of reporting, or just a list of woes and a few principles?
@Kevin – your approach made me chuckle, as I am just writing up a pointless report myself. However, doesn’t this approach confuse a judgement about the source of the report, with the content or type of report itself? I may find one report from you useless, but the next more useful, and if you don’t send it to me I will never know.
Tom Longley
1 Nov 08 at 8:48
I made a couple of recommendations in the Assessment, but it wasn’t one of the issues that got turned into a project by the NGO members. The problem is that the reporting problem isn’t something that IT staff are involved in, so they’re unlikely to offer solutions to it. That’s nobody’s fault, but it does mean that we’re not taking advantage of the technology – emailing has simply taken the place of faxing reports.
Paul Currion
1 Nov 08 at 9:29
Sorry, comment form being odd for me. I think the other purpose of reports is being an institutional memory. Even if they’re not read now, they may be needed later when there has been staff turnover. I’ve been in a lot of projects where we can’t find out what we did five years ago, and that’s a problem.
Alanna
6 Nov 08 at 13:43
I agree with the poster who said “The sector has been trying for decades to behave in an accountable way, and reporting is a part of that” and the other who said, “the other purpose of reports is being an institutional memory.” I *do* read reports, both to know the lay of the land when I come into a position and as a part of my role as a communications manager or a program manager. And I am astounded at how badly written most are. Sorry to say this, but when I’ve encountered aid workers reluctant to write reports, it’s often been because they don’t have much to report.
A report should tell your audience – “I/this unit/this program got a LOT of meaningful/fundamentally-important activities done in this reporting period. Here is a list of those activities and why they were important:” If that’s something that seems hard to you, maybe the problem isn’t the report, but what you are doing in the field.
I agree that reporting requirements can get way out of control, absolutely, especially when donors, sponsors and partners all have different timetables and forms they want everyone to use. But when that’s happened, I’ve always had great success negotiating streamlining, asking donors if they will all settle for the same quarterly report, for instance, rather than one for each of them, or reducing weekly reports to one page of bullet points.
Jayne Cravens
17 Nov 08 at 12:36
Jayne – good point. Report writing is a skill that not many people have in copious amounts, which is probably why people complain about it so much….
Both of the tactics you suggest are good starting points – I am surprised you had success with donors regarding reports. On my side, they still refuse to compromise on their existing institutional reporting formats (most of which are extremely poor in terms of actually communicating anything of substance).
Paul Currion
17 Nov 08 at 12:51