With the right strategic thinking up front, any reporting process for a consulting job can be as simple as filling in the boxes.

Last week Joanna and I were a bit overwhelmed by the number of pages of notes that we had both taken in the research and scoping phase of a knowledge management project for from a large listed Australian Corporation. They have over 300 franchises.  Together we had documented a myriad of new and legacy communication mechanisms and numerous technical systems that included email, intranet and CRM etc. The challenge now was to make sense of the data and sensibly combine our notes to create a report!

I started by looking at the mind map notes we had taken and identifing some common themes around what each person we interviewed had told us.  By finding these themes I could create a list of things that we could report on for each communication system they had.  Like this:

When I showed it to Joanna she breathed a sigh of relief! By using this framework and filling in the boxes about the key themes for each system, she can easily ensure coverage of the important issues across every communication mechanism.  And, more importantly,  work out what else we had to find out.

The creation of a framework allowed us to get our heads around a massive amount of data and also allow collaborate on the reporting framework in a quick and easy fashion. All with the confidence that no strategic issues will be missed.

I use this framework approach to any work I do. If I don’t have a framework to think from the tasks will feel overwhelming. It’s just like when you have lots of things to do. Writing a list very rapidly dispels any angst you may have.

Have other people seen frameworks like this?