Structure of a WAC report

The Preliminary Pages

Cover Page:
The cover page ought to contain:

 Title of the report (same as the subject-line of the Letter of Transmittal)

 Name of the recipient with designation below the name
 Name of the writer with designation below the same
 Month and year

Letter of Transmittal
This is a cover note addressed to the reader of the report (as specified in the assignment). It gives an
overview of the content of the report and the key recommendation. If the report is to an internal
reader (such as the writer’s boss) it may follow the memo format.

Executive Summary
The executive summary is not a statement to merely indicate what you will find in the report but a
miniature report. So ideally it contains the first six parts of the report, beginning with the situation
analysis and ending with the recommendation. The executive summary should not exceed ten
percent of the full report.

Contents page
As the reports you write for WAC are very short (the word limit is normally 1000, plus or minus 10
percent), there is really no need for a separate contents page. However, we suggest that you put in
a contents page so that you get into the habit of providing one when you write longer reports.

The Report
Situation Analysis
This is the most important part of your report because the rest of the report 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 analyse 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 for the
managerial challenges that have 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.

Options
Once you define the problem, the next step is to generate different 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 and 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, 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 all 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 most important criterion, it
cannot be adopted even if it meets all the other criteria.

The prioritization of 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 apply them to ALL the options identified. It is not enough
to apply them to one of the most promising options.

The Recommendation
Now you are ready to make your recommendation. It is the option that has passed all 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.

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 recommendations 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. An action plan consists of the steps one needs to follow to execute your
recommendations.