Page 80 - Today’s Business Communication; A How-to Guide for the Modern Professional

WhY MUST I MASTER REPORT WRITINg? 69

Budget
Allocating the budget is an essential part of strategic planning. All costs
should be taken into consideration. Salaries and benefits, however, are
sometimes not part of the budget, especially if you are doing strategic
planning in communications or marketing or some other functional
area of business. These items aren’t part of a marketing plan. The pri-
mary reason for a budget is to let you know what you can or can’t do,
based on the funds available. It also allows you to allocate money to
the specific areas of the plan. Make your budget realistic, and provide a
break-even analysis in your budget.

Evaluation

Though placed last, it would be useful to have at least three evaluation
points in your strategic plan. Therefore, you must decide how and when
to execute three evaluations of your progress toward your goals. Evalua-
tion is an ongoing process, particularly in a long-term strategic plan, so it
is critical to constantly review all specific elements (tactics) to see how you
are progressing toward accomplishing your goal (strategy). Evaluation is
vital to discover which parts of the strategic plan are successful and which
are not. Not only that, it helps determine what the current situation is
after the tactics/activities have ended, in comparison to what the situation
was before you implemented your plan.

Conclusion

Now that you’ve worked through this chapter on report writing and
gotten a crash course on strategic planning as a type of business report,
we hope you understand clearly the answer to this chapter’s question:
Why Must I Master Report Writing? The answer is simple: To succeed
in your career, you will have to master this important skill. Organiza-
tions make decisions based on reports. Reports are not easy to write
and involve both risk and reward. Many workers try to avoid writ-
ing reports for these very reasons. But, professionals who hone their
report-writing skills and volunteer for such opportunities make them-
selves invaluable to their organizations.