1. Style and format
Imagine that your target readers are busy executives. Many of you have chosen real-life projects that would bring real benefit to your company if they were implemented, and you have the opportunity here to be change agents and be champions for innovative improvement. So you want to write reports that will be read and taken notice of.
So, do not write it as a novel, that is, do not write it as unstructured text. Here are some of the techniques you can use to structure your report.
Number the pages.
Use numbered headings and sub-headings (format them with Word's Heading styles).
Start with a title page.
Include a Table of Contents (let Word generate it for you from the headings and sub-headings).
Include an Executive Summary.
2. Body of the Report
The body of the report can be structured in a number of ways, but it needs to have the following elements present in one form or another.
2.1 Introduction
This is where you give some background on the company, as relevant to the project. Describe its organizational structure, the business it is in, the competitive forces it faces, and briefly introduce the area of concern, the business need you are addressing.
2.2 Analysis
Here you analyse the problem in detail, and break it out into its separate parts. Your understanding of MIS will be important here because if you do this well, you will have broken the problem down in such a way that the role IT can plan in solving the problems, adding value, and providing competitive advantage will be quite apparent and easy to see, and therefore (hopefully), easy to 'sell'.
2.3 Recommendations and Implementation Plan
Your recommendations do not have to be your proposed solution to the problem, although if you have sufficient background on and input into the problem, you may be able to do that. But if not, you can recommend the approach your company should take to developing a solution, using the MIS principles you have learned. You can...