17 Pulling everything together

If you’ve followed the instructions and guidance, then pulling the report together should be pretty simple.

There’s a good chance you might be thinking that I’m glossing over the difficulties of populating the template and what I’ve just described is too good to be true.

And you are partially right: there are times when the report just won’t come together and you feel like you are fighting with the data. Things feel incomplete and you keep having to stop to hunt for more information. It certainly isn’t as straightforward as Bobbie’s day.

What I just described is what compiling the report feels like when you’re properly prepared. If it’s not flowing, then you’ve probably started compiling your report before you’re ready. Sometimes that’s because your timeline was cut and you are having to rush compilation and at other times, it means that you weren’t able to get all your prep done in time. Perhaps your notes aren’t organized. Maybe you didn’t hammer out all the details of the methodology. You might not be fully comfortable yourself with your metrics.

The biggest reason I have found for a lack of flow was that I simply didn’t understand the organization properly. I hadn’t gathered enough information and I wasn’t feeling fully comfortable with what I had. I would keep stopping to verify a piece of information or I would have to dig back through my notes to make sure what I had written was accurate. I would be second-guessing myself the whole time. In short, I wasn’t ready to complete the assessment because I hadn’t completed the previous steps.

So if you don’t feel as though you are ready to compile your results, then you shouldn’t go any further until you work out what the gaps are and close those. Otherwise the final assessment will have gaps or inconsistencies in it which are going to hinder the decision-makers.

If there is a genuine need to accelerate the report and cut the time available, you need to go back and reduce the scope. Zero in on the critical issues under consideration and the key decisions people are trying to make. Then, focus on what’s needed to support this work.

Better to give thorough answers to a couple of questions than partial answers to several. You should continue to work on the full assessment in the background but this way, you can meet the decision-makers’ most urgent needs and still deliver the full report.

The key thing is that if you don’t feel ready to write the report, or get bogged down as soon as you start, then something’s missing and you need to address that before you go any farther. Remember, the hard work is gathering the information and interpreting it. By this stage, you should just be filling in the blanks and completing whatever template you’ve selected.

As you go, you will still find small ‘bugs’ here and there. You might notice that there are inconsistencies that appear once you collate everything. You might want to go back and check a piece of data. All of that is fine – this is a significant piece of work and what you produce now won’t be your final report, not by a long shot. The point is that there is a difference between the normal kind of fact-checking and review that is part of the risk assessment process and trying to write the report when you have significant information gaps.

Once you have this initial draft of the assessment, it’s time to sense check everything through a series of reviews with the client. This allows you to close any gaps you’ve identified and tackle any discrepancies that have arisen to ensure that the final report is as accurate as possible. It’s also a way to start to introduce the results to the client so you aren’t simply dropping the whole report on them with no preparation.

However, as Bobbie’s about to find out, that can be the hardest part of the whole project.