This article is reprinted from The Consulting Journal
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Techniques: Preventing stale reports (1)
by David Blakey
Reports will all eventually become stale. Prevent this becoming a problem.
[Monday 18 April 2005]
Reports that you have written will age. They will eventually become out of date, especially if they are reports that report on the situation at a given time and recommend action for the future. If your recommendations are followed, the situation described in your report will no longer exist.
You expect that your reports will age. You may not expect that your reports will become stale when they should still be fresh. Let me explain with a scenario.
Imagine that you wrote a report about the current situation in January. Your client said that they would read and consider your report and then contact you for additional advice. It is now March. You have heard nothing. When you do contact your client, they sound disappointed with your report. When you ask them why, they say that it is because your report does not help them to move forward. You sense that they are reluctant to continue engaging you.
The reason is that your report has become stale. You satisfied your brief by writing about the situation in January. The person to whom you gave the report may have thought about it over the past two months. They may have thought about your recommendations, they may have selected an option for future action, and they may have started to plan that future action. Also, your report may have been circulated and discussed. Many other people may have thought about it, made choices, and made plans. All of these people will now be thinking beyond your report. If they look at it now, in March, it will no longer meet their current expectations. It will be stale.
If you now go to the client and ask them to review your report, they may not only think that it is stale. They may think that it is inadequate and that it does not meet their needs. Their thoughts have moved on; your report has not.
Remember that you still have not got a sign-off on the report. In a logical, phased world, the client would sign off your report before they reviewed the options, chose a course of action and made plans. Human nature is not like that. Your report may not be signed off, but your client may have thought well beyond it.
The solution is to make sure that you remain informed. If clients say that they need time before they can sign off your report, do not just wait for that sign-off to happen. If you wait for the sign-off, without doing anything else, then you can expect trouble.
To avoid trouble, I have a simple solution. As with many simple solutions, it may not make sense when I first describe it. I expect that it will quickly make sense, as I explain how it works. I hope that it will eventually become second nature. And the simple solution is this: imagine that the report will never be signed-off.
There are two questions that you would ask if you knew that the client would never sign off the report. The first question is: why not?
The second question is: what do I do now?
There are two reasons why a client will never sign off a report: either they don't need to, or they don't want to. So either the client agrees with the report and will move on to the next action or they disagree with the report and will not act. You probably cannot find out which, because the client has said that they need time before they can sign the report off. The client does not yet know whether they will accept or reject the report. Even if they do know, they will not say it directly. So you have to assume that the report will never be signed off and you will have to prepare for both acceptance and rejection.
The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.
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