Comments on: Kill Your Reports

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:51:37 +0000

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).

By: Jayne Cravens

Jayne Cravens — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 12:36:50 +0000

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.

By: Alanna

Alanna — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 13:43:51 +0000

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.

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 09:29:58 +0000

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.

By: Tom Longley

Tom Longley — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 08:48:07 +0000

@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.

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 07:04:51 +0000

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…

By: Paul Currion

Paul Currion — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 07:01:38 +0000

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”?

By: Kevin Toomer

Kevin Toomer — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 04:40:35 +0000

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.

By: Kevin Toomer

Kevin Toomer — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 02:19:00 +0000

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.

By: Matthew Slater

Matthew Slater — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 17:19:19 +0000

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.