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How to Structure and Present your Decision Report

There are many equally effective ways in which a decision report

can be structured and presented. You may have a favorite structure
that has worked well. We, however, insist on the following structure
because a decision report is an instructional exercise and we would
like you to go systematically through all the processes involved in
rational decision making.

1. Situation Analysis
2. The Problem
3. The Options
4. Criteria for Evaluation
5. Evaluation of Options
6. The Recommendation
7. Action Plan
8. Contingency Plan
9. Exhibits (if any)

Executive Summary

The executive summary is not a statement merely indicating what

you will find in the report, but a miniature report. So ideally it
contains the first six out of the nine parts of a report as shown
above. The ES should not exceed ten per cent of the full report.
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The Report

Situation Analysis

This is possibly the most important part of your report because the
rest of the report is built on it. It shows your reading or analysis of
the situation. It is neither a description of the situation nor a
summary of the case facts. This is where you zero in on the facts
that you consider relevant for decision making and indicate the
relationships that you perceive between those facts. If you analyze
the situation well, you will have no difficulty defining the decision
problem or the managerial challenge faced by the protagonist in the
case.

The Problem

Here you articulate briefly and precisely the problem to which a

solution has to be found or the managerial challenge that has to be
met by the protagonist. It flows from your analysis of the situation.
Therefore there is nothing surprising about different students seeing
different problems in the same situation.

The Options

Once you define the problem, the next step is to generate different
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ways of solving it. These are the options available to the decision-
maker. The ideal options are mutually exclusive, that is, if you opt
for A, you cannot also opt for B or C. If, for example, you want to
buy a TV set, the options are the different TV sets available for you
to buy. It is obvious that choosing any one of the TV sets
automatically rules out buying any other TV sets.

For good decision-making it is important to generate credible

options, options that have a reasonable chance of being adopted.
This is where your creativity should help you.

Criteria for Evaluation

Faced with different options, how do we identify the best? By

applying criteria. Criteria are the norms that an option should pass
for it to be adopted as the solution. In the TV purchase example,
the norms could be price, quality, brand, physical size, and after-
sales service. These criteria are not universal: they stem from the
analysis of a given situation. Price, for example, may not be a
consideration at ail in some families while it may be the most
important criterion in some others.

Identifying the best option is relatively simple if there is just one

criterion. If there are multiple criteria you should prioritize them; in
other words you should indicate which criterion is the most
important and which criteria are less important. If an option fails the
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most important criterion, it cannot be adopted even if it meets all the

other criteria.

The prioritization of the criteria stems from the analysis of the

situation. You may need to justify your prioritization unless it is very
obvious.

Evaluation of Options

Once you have prioritized the criteria, you must apply them to ALL
the options identified. It is not enough to apply them to one or the
most promising options.

The Recommendation

Now you are ready to make your recommendation. It is the option

that has passed all the criteria you have identified. If none of the
options clear all the criteria, the option that meets most of the
criteria, especially the most important one(s), is the one that you
recommend to the decision-maker. If the options don’t pass the
criteria, you may want to go back to the analysis of the situation,
generate more options, and repeat the process.
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Action Plan

Once you recommend what to do, follow it up with how to put that
recommendation into action. This helps you think through the
consequences of your recommendation and at times forces you to
revise it. A well laid out action plan helps the reader take your
recommendation seriously and adopt it without hesitation.

Contingency Plan

With the action plan, your report is complete. We, however, ask you
to go an extra step. Anticipate things that may go wrong when the
recommendation is put into action. One contingency in the TV
purchase example might be a temporary shortage of the chosen
size and brand if the situation analysis had hinted at some
production or distribution problems. You need to suggest what to do
in such a contingency. That is your contingency plan. Your
contingency plan should NOT be adoption of one of the rejected
options.

A good contingency plan enhances your report. You shouldn’t,

however, look for outlandish contingencies just to fill in a slot in the
report.
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Exhibits

Exhibits are tables, charts, graphs, worksheets, and other similar

collections of data which support the argument in your report.
Incorporating such data as running text in the report may make the
report unnecessarily lengthy and less readable. Some reports may
not have any exhibits while others may have several.

If you have any exhibits, give it brief, explanatory titles and number
them according to the order in which they are referred to in the body
of the report. If you have only one or two very small exhibits, you
may put them in the body of the report, close to where they are
referred to. But if the exhibits are long, place them at the end of the
report in the same order as they have been referred to. Your
decision on where to put the exhibits should be based on
readability.

Don’t put discussions, analysis and interpretations in exhibits: these

should be a part of the main body of the report. Don't put in orphan
exhibits either - tables and charts that are not referred to in the body
of the report.