 Lecture 28, As-Salaamu Alaikum. Welcome to the virtual university's course on business and technical communication. In today's lecture we will look at progress reports. We are going to look at the typical writing situations which demand a progress report to be written. We will look and also we look at why is it that progress reports are written and they are basically written to deal with the reader's concerns with the future. We will also look at the questions that readers are most likely to ask, the most frequently asked questions of a progress report and we look at a superstructure for progress reports. This superstructure includes an introduction, a section on facts and discussion which will include answering your reader's questions. It will provide the appropriate amount of information. It gives the organization of the discussion and emphasizes the important findings and problems. Then there is a conclusion section and a recommendation section and finally a note on the location of conclusions and recommendations. We will also look at the tone of progress reports. We will be showing you some sample outlines. We will look at a planning guide and have a look at a sample progress report as well. Now, typically progress reports are required in two types of situations. In the first you tell your reader about your progress on one particular project. As a geologist employed by an engineering consulting firm Lee needs to do this. His employer has assigned him to study the site that a large city would like to use for a civic center and large office building. The city is worried that the site might not be geologically suited for such a construction. Lee is a geologist who works for an engineering company. His company has assigned him a project where he would like to use the site that he would like to use for a civic center and large office building. The city where the civic center and office building are located, people are worried that the site might not be geologically suited for such a construction. The land is not geologically suited for such a big building. Lee is a geologist who studies the land. He has to send a progress report for the construction. Every two weeks Lee must submit a progress report to his supervisor and to the city engineer who is the main engineer in the city who is planning. He also has to send a progress report to him and to his company as well. Lee's supervisor uses the progress report to be sure that Lee is conducting the study in a rapid and technically sound manner. Now because the supervisor is getting a report every two weeks, he can be sure that the work that Lee is doing, the study that Lee is conducting about the site is actually on time. It's technically sound and he is not wasting any time or material. The city engineer who uses the report to see that Lee's study is progressing according to the schedule that is planned for it. She will also look for preliminary indications about the likely outcome of the study. The progress report will give them an idea of what will be the final conclusion and outcome of the study. And according to that, whatever findings are found in the progress report, of course the entire report or the entire study will be published in the end. But the progress report will periodically show how progress is being done in the study and according to that, the decisions to be taken together will not be easy. In the second type of situation, you will write progress reports that tell about all the work that you're doing on different projects. In the first situation, we see that one project is being given a progress report on how the project is being done or a study that we saw that Lee was conducting, so they gave a progress report on how the study is being done. In the second situation, it is possible that you are working on more than one project or you are supervising more than one project. And you have to give a progress report about all of them. Many employers will require their workers to file progress reports periodically over the year, every year. So there will be maybe every two weeks, every one month, every week, whatever the requirement is. The workers will be filing reports on the work that they're doing as normal routine. They won't wait for a particular project and then start filing progress reports. Let's have a look at the example of Jacqueline, who is one such person who needs to write these regular progress reports or periodic reports, as they're also called. Jacqueline works in the research division of a large manufacturer of consumer products and she manages a department that is responsible for improving the formulas for the company's laundry detergents. The responsibility of that department is that the company that is selling detergents or washing powders, how to improve their formulas, how to make better detergents. The department is responsible for making them clean and smell better, making them less expensive to manufacture and making them safer for the environment. These are three basic things that the department deals with so that these three things are kept in mind and the formulas can be improved for the detergents. Now at any one time, the people working under Jacqueline, her staff, is working on between 10 and 20 different projects. Obviously the department is looking at many different things. There's a lot of work going on in order to improve the formulas for making these detergents. So there are a lot of people and they're working on many different things simultaneously. As part of her regular responsibilities, Jacqueline must write a report every two weeks to summarize the progress on each of the projects. These reports have many readers including her immediate superiors who want to be sure that her department's work is proceeding in a satisfactory manner. Other people who read her report could be people from the marketing department or a marketing agency that the company works with and they are looking for any discoveries that they can use in the products that they are responsible for selling. For example, if dishwashing detergents or whatever it is that they're selling, they would want to know what discoveries have been made so that they can use that information to market those products better or her readers could be her corporate planners who will want to anticipate changes in the formula that the department is working on so that if there are any alterations needed in the production line, then they can start working on those or any changes in advertising campaign, etc. to market the products. So there would be many different readers of the progress report and keeping that in mind, Jacqueline will tailor her reports. As the examples of Lee and Jacqueline indicate, progress reports can vary from one situation to another and they can have many different purposes and many different types of readers as well. They may cover one project or many projects. They may be addressed to people inside the writer's organization or outside it. As we saw in Lee's case, his progress report was addressed to the city engineer who was not part of his company and they may be used by people with a variety of interests for reading them. Some people could be reading them to learn things that they need to know. Some people could be reading them to learn how to manage things differently or better and some people would be reading them to make certain decisions. So progress reports have different purposes and different types of audiences and different types of readerships. One thing that all progress reports address is the readers' concerns about the future. Despite their diversity, almost all progress reports will have this in common. The readers are primarily concerned with the future of what needs to be done according to the progress report. Even though most progress reports talk primarily about what has happened in the past, most of the progress reports tell us what has happened so far but from the previous information we find out what will happen in the future. The readers usually want the information so that they can plan for and act in the future. They want to predict what will happen in the future based on what has happened in the past, what has been reported in the progress report. Now, why is it that progress reports written in the past stands are basically concerned about the future? You need to consider the responsibilities that your readers will be fulfilling by reading your progress reports. You need to consider the responsibilities that your readers will be fulfilling by reading your progress reports. From your report they may be trying to learn the things they need to know how to manage your project. They will want to know for instance what they should do, if anything, to keep your project going smoothly or to get it back on track. So, the reports written by Lee and Jacqueline that we saw are used for this purpose by some of their readers. Also, from your report, some people may also want to be trying to learn things that they need to know to manage other projects. This is because almost all projects in an organization are interdependent with each other. Most of the projects in an organization have a certain connection to each other. So, the way your project is progressing, the same way the progress of other projects will be fast or slow or it will have some effect on it. So, if your readers, supervisors or managers are your readers, they may have to make some changes or make some decisions in other projects. For example, other departments and other people in the company may need the results of your projects as they work on their own projects. For example, when we were talking about detergents in Jacqueline's company, they may also need the results of other departments, because when they want to manufacture their products, they also need to know what changes will be made in the formula and what improvements will be made so that they can follow their procedures. Maybe you're conducting a market survey whose results the other departments need so that they can design an advertising campaign or maybe your company can install some other equipment according to the market survey that you're conducting. If your company changes its marketing campaign or decides to make a decision on the product production, it's not necessary that they wait for the entire project to be finished and take their decisions based on their findings. They can take the same decisions on the basis of your progress report. If your project is going to be late, the schedules of those projects, of other projects may have to be adjusted accordingly. Similarly, if your project costs more than expected, then money and resources will have to be taken away from other activities to compensate for the cost of your project. The higher-ups in your company might need to reallocate resources and they will be able to do that based on your progress report. So because of interdependencies like these, your readers need information about the past accomplishments and problems in your project so that they can make plans for the future. So that is really how the readers are concerned with the future based on your report of the past. Similarly, your readers will often be interested in learning the preliminary results of your work. Suppose, for instance, that you complete one part of your research project before you complete the others and then your audience may very well be able to use that part of your research immediately instead of waiting for the other parts. Now coming to the questions that readers are most likely to ask, the questions that readers ask most often. The readers' concerns with the implications of your progress for their future work and decisions leads them to want you to answer the following questions in your progress reports. So if your report describes more than one project, your readers will ask these questions. They will ask what work does your report cover to be able to understand anything else in progress reports. Readers must know what project or projects and what time period the report covers. Also, what is the purpose of the work? Readers need to know the purpose of your work, the project you're working on, the report that you're filing to see how your work relates to their responsibilities and to the other work that they're engaged in present or future, the work that has been done in the present or that is going to be done in the future in the organization. Another question that readers will ask very frequently is, is your work progressing as planned or expected? Now this is a very important question that comes up when people are reading progress reports because obviously progress report, as the name suggests, it talks about the progress that has been done so far. So readers want to know that. They will want to determine if adjustments are needed in the schedule. Do they need to make any adjustments in the budget or the number of people assigned on the project or project that you're working on etc. They will also ask what results did you produce? The results you produce in one reporting period may influence the shape of work in future periods. Also, even when you are still in the midst of a project, readers will want to know about any results they can use in other projects now before you finish your overall work. You are giving any results if you have anything to say, any results to give, if you've made any discoveries, if you've made any conclusions, you need to give those in your progress report so that other people can use them according to their need. Readers will also want to know what progress you expect during the next reporting period. Your readers' interests will focus on such management concerns as schedule and budget and on the kinds of results that they can expect. So once they know what your expectations are before the next progress report, that is how they will plan and they also need to know how things stand overall and this question will arise especially in long reports. Basically, readers will want to know the overall status of your work because that is something that they may not be able to tell readily from the details that you provide in a long report. You might be providing a lot of details but at one glance or reading just by reading that report, they might not be able to grasp the overall conclusions that you draw so you need to state those separately. Also, as we talked about infeasibility reports, your readers want to know what you think they should do. Is there any course of action that is planned for them based on the work that you are doing? Do you need them to do anything? Then you need to spell that out. If you are experiencing or expecting problems, your readers will want your recommendations about what should be done. If you have other ideas about how the project could be improved, they will probably welcome those as well. So any suggestions you have, anything as you are going along, as you are doing your working on your project, any suggestions, any recommendations that you have, you should include those in your progress report. If you feel that they are going to make the work easier and better during that project. To answer your readers' questions, you can use the conventional superstructure for writing progress reports and this has the following elements. It has an introduction, it has a section on facts, a discussion, conclusions and recommendations. Now let us see, as we have seen before, the superstructure for our report corresponds to the questions that are in the reader's minds, the questions that readers ask most often. Let us have a look at how these relate to, these questions relate to the superstructure of progress reports. In the introduction to progress report, you should answer two questions. What work does the report cover and what is the purpose of the work? You can usually answer the question, what work does the report cover by opening with a sentence that tells what project to projects your report is concerned with and what time period it covers. Now sometimes the second question, what is the purpose of the work, will not need to be answered. Sometimes you will, sometimes it doesn't need to be addressed because all your readers will already be quite familiar with the purpose of your work. So if you feel that the purpose of your work is familiar to your readers, then you don't need to answer it. At other times however, it will be crucial for you to tell your work's purpose because your readers will include people who don't know or may have forgotten it. So if you feel that that is the case, that your readers may not know the purpose, they may not know why the work was being done or if you feel that it was commissioned so long ago that they might have forgotten the purpose of the work, then you need to remind them in your introduction. You're especially likely to have such readers when your written report will be widely circulated in your own organization. Also when you're writing to another organization that has hired your employer to do the work, then you will also give the purpose. You can usually explain purpose most helpfully by describing the problem that your project will help your readers to solve. Let's have a look at an example where the first sentence shows how one manager answered the reader's first two questions. In the first sentence, he talked of the project. This report covers the work done on the focus project from July 1st through September 1st. Now the purpose of the project. Sponsored by the U.S. government of energy, the aim of the focus project is to overcome the technical difficulties encountered in manufacturing photovoltaic cells that can be used to generate commercial amounts of electricity. Now obviously this is very clearly the purpose of the report that it says who it was sponsored by and what the aim of the report is. The next section of your report after your introduction is the section on facts and the discussion of those facts. In the discussion section of your progress report, you should answer the reader's questions. Is your work progressing as planned or expected? Another question that you will deal with is what results did you produce? And a third question that you will deal with is what progress do you expect during the next reporting period? In many situations, the work for each reporting period is planned in advance. It is decided that in these two weeks or in the next ten days, what will happen and what will happen in the next time period. And the report will go along with it. It is planned in advance. And in such cases, you can easily tell about your progress by comparing what happened with, by comparing what happened with, what was planned. Obviously, if it has been planned in advance that we have to work till this date, till this date and till this date, then when that first date will come, which was your first deadline, then when you will write the report on it, then you will talk about what has happened and compare it to what the company had planned. If you are going according to the schedule, then you will write that these are our targets, we have met them. Or if you are going fast, then you will write that. If you are going slowly, then you will tell your progress. Where there are significant discrepancies between the two. If there is a very big difference between what was planned and the progress, then you readers will want to know why. Obviously, if a planning has been done and if you are not going according to that, there is a very major difference in that plan and in your progress. So, your readers will want to know why there is so much difference. Was there a problem in the planning? Or was there a problem in the work? If there are discrepancies between the planned work and the progress because you are facing some problems, then the information you provide about those problems will help your readers in finding a remedy for them. Obviously, you are writing a progress report for your superior or for your company's people. Then when you will tell your problems that these are the reasons because of which our progress is not as we had planned, then when the answer to those problems is clear, then you will be able to find a solution for them. It will also help you to explain any recommendations you make later in your report. If you will do any recommendations in your report, probably when your report will be finished or your work will be finished, then referring to the problems you faced you will be able to make any necessary recommendations. When you are discussing preliminary results that your readers might use, be sure to explain them in terms that allow your readers to see their significance. If you have any results that you have received in the beginning in the progress report, then you have to test that you should tell those results in such a way that the readers should know their significance that why they are important. Do not tell them casually that you are mentioning or that they do not have any significance that they should not be taken into action or that they should not be registered by the reader. In research projects preliminary results are often tentative. There are many times that preliminary results are not final results but they are tentative results. And if this is the case, then you need to let your reader know how certain or how uncertain. You need to let your reader know that. Because this information will help the readers decide how to use the results. If you do not have this clarity, that your results are uncertain then your reader will not know how to use the results. But for example, if your results are uncertain there are tentative results but you are mentioning them because it is important to let the reader know that maybe they have some work to do and then you have to mention them that these are tentative results. Because if the readers understand those results and take some action, then that decision may be wrong. Obviously when you are giving any information in your progress report, you need to consider how much information to give and what type of information to give. You need to give the appropriate amount of information. When preparing progress reports, people often wonder how much information they should include. Generally, progress reports are brief because readers want them that way. It happens that because these reports are going on periodically they do not need to be too long. Even the readers want a brief summary of what happened in the last few days. While you need to provide your readers with specific information about your work, do not include details except when you feel that the details will help your readers in deciding how to manage your project. Or when you believe that your readers can make some immediate use of those details. If you think that the details you are giving do not have any foery use or if you do not have any management decision then you do not need to include details. When you are engaged in projects, in many projects, you will learn lots of little things and you will have lots of little setbacks, lots of little triumphs along the way. There is no need to include all of those in your progress report. Avoid talking about these because they might be very interesting to you. There might be triumphs for you. There might be setbacks for you. There might be personal experiences that you have gained but your reader is not really interested in reading about them unless they contribute significantly to the work that you are doing or to future decisions about the work that you are involved in. Stick to the information that your readers can use. Now this will talk about the facts and how much detail you will include in your progress report. Now what about organizing those facts? You can organize your discussion section in many ways. One way is to arrange your material according to the around the time period. You will be answering questions about what happened during the most recent time period and what is expected to happen during the next time period. These will be two things that you can focus on. What happened during the last time period and what is expected to happen in the future. You will find that this organization centering around the time period is especially well suited for reports in which you discuss a single project that has distinct and separate stages so that you are only working on one stage at one time and then you are reporting in that particular stage in one report. However, you can also expand this structure for reports that cover either several projects or one project in which several tasks perform simultaneously. You can then organize it according to when you are talking about what happened during the most recent time period then you can talk about project A or task A and then project B and if you are talking about what is expected to happen in the next time period then also you can talk first about project A and then about project B. When you prepare reports that cover more than one project or more than one task as we just saw you might also consider organizing around those projects or tasks it is not necessary to organize your discussion according to the time period you can also organize your discussion with regards to those projects and tasks when you are talking about only one task or only one project then your only classifying feature will be the time period but if you are talking about more than one project then either you can classify them according to the time period you can organize your discussion or you can classify them with regards to the time period you can talk of work on project A then what happened during the last time period and then what is expected to happen during the next time period and after this you can talk of work on project B what happened during the last time period with reference to project B and what is expected to happen during the next time period with reference to project B this organization works very well reports that are more than a few paragraphs long because it keeps all the information on each project together and it makes the report easy for the readers to follow. Another important aspect is that you should emphasize all important findings and problems. As mentioned, your findings and problems are important to your readers. Why are they important? Because they help them in making decisions about the future, they help them in making decisions about how the project is going to progress. They may involve information, your findings may involve information that can be used right away by others. Your problems are important because they may require your readers to change their plans. Because your findings and problems can be so important to your readers, be sure that you devote enough discussion to them to satisfy your readers' needs and desires for information. No matter how important your findings and problems are, they are important to your readers. Also place these devices so that they are easy to find. The emphasis that you are giving is to use devices to emphasize and make these emphatic devices obvious so that it becomes clear to the reader that these are points that you are trying to emphasize. Once you've talked about all your facts, you've organized your discussion, you've emphasized all the important points, you will come to your conclusions. Your conclusions are your overall views of the progress of your work. In short progress reports, there may be no need to include conclusions. A small report that is going to be read can draw conclusions. But if your report covers many projects or tasks, a conclusion may help your reader understand the general state of your progress. Finally, you will come to the recommendations. If you have any ideas about how to improve the project or the work that you are doing or the work that you are involved with or how to increase the value of its results, your readers will probably want you to include recommendations. Your recommendations might be directed at overcoming problems in the future or they may be directed at refocusing or altering the time period in which you are working. In this lecture, while we looked at the typical writing situations that require progress reports, we also looked at the reader's concerns and the questions that readers ask most often. And most importantly, we looked at the superstructure of progress reports. We looked at the introduction, the facts and discussion section, how to answer the reader's questions, how to provide the appropriate amount of information, the organization of the discussion and how to emphasize important findings and problems and why it was important to emphasize them. We also looked at the conclusion section and what role that plays and the recommendations. We also looked at where it was appropriate to provide conclusions and where it was not appropriate. We talked about the fact that in long reports, it was necessary to provide conclusions to give an overall view and in short reports, it was not that necessary because the readers could actually infer the conclusions from what you were saying. So that's all for today about progress reports. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us. The address is as usual English at vu.edu.pk. Until next time, Allah Hafiz.