Operational summary
Tips for writing an effective technical report

The purpose of this section is to provide the reader with a brief overview of the main points of the document. There are two reasons for this:

• make it easier to find information in a document among a stack of reports ;

• get a quick idea of the document's content, and make you want (or not) to read the whole document.

An interesting way of structuring this operational summary is to separate it into two parts:

• objectives of the document: these must be formulated in a sentence with an infinitive verb such as: "demonstrate the feasibility of reducing the assembly time of part X by 20%";

• executive summary: this summary should be the answer to achieving these objectives. In other words, you can...