Bill Gates may be remembered for many things during his time at Microsoft, least of not would be the famous "Blue Screen" heart stopper, which is thankfully now a rare occurrence. Next on the list must surely be the creation of the presentation application, innocently named "PowerPoint". Who would have guessed that such a simple concept of mirroring the old slide shows would evolve into one of the greatest time wasters in the business world? Of course, there is a time and place for everything and some incredibly creative and informative PowerPoint slides have been produced.
However, for the majority of process improvement projects, where there can be many twists and turns along the way, there is little to be gained by duplicating all your intermediate findings in PowerPoint. Far better to keep the messy workings in their original formats and produce a simple one page summary of the project conclusions, for distribution to interested parties.
Toyota realised this a long time ago, when they introduced the "A3" report, appropriately named for containing everything on a single side of A3 paper or "pdf", if you've gone paperless. It may have been their focus on waste or their philosophy of relentless continuous improvement, but they were definitely on to something. It contains a complete project, from initial definition through to control and any proposed follow up and is a great example of concise reporting.
It may seem easy to write less rather than more but it can be quite a challenge to remove what’s not really important and just to keep the essentials.