For the purpose of this extended assignment, you are currently an intern at Kingsville Boutique Consulting, a small firm that advises other businesses.
Flagship Etailers is a small business that has recently been receiving a lot of internal complaints about virtual communication. For example, during the annual performance evaluation at the end of January, supervisors found that several employees did not see the value of virtual communication in the business setting. This attitude has led to delayed communications and lost productivity. The owner of Flagship Etailers, Sarah Warden, wants to find recent research that shows the value of virtual communication as well as strategies for using it effectively. She plans to use this research to organize company-wide training sessions in virtual communication. Therefore, Warden has hired Kingsville Boutique Consulting to prepare a report that incorporates some of the latest findings on virtual business communication.
At Kingsville Boutique Consulting, your internship supervisor, James Vorhies, has prepared a draft of the research report titled "Virtual Business Communication" (see the attached file). However, it does not contain any of the front matter that is required in a report. Vorhies knows that you recently learned report writing in your BCOM course, so he has asked you to read the report and prepare its executive summary.
An executive summary, as the name implies, is a summary of a report. Some people may read an entire report, from start to finish, but others may just read the executive summary. Therefore, the executive summary needs to be informative. In an executive summary, do not tell the reader what the report is about; tell the reader what the report actually says. The executive summary needs to include the purpose of the report, the main findings, the main conclusions, and the main recommendations. In general, an executive summary’s length is about 10% of the length of the body of the report. Therefore, for a 10-page report, the executive summary will be about 1 page, single-spaced. Include section headings in your executive summary, and use formatting features, including numbered and bulleted lists, to make your summary easy to scan. Do not refer to the main report (for example, do not say "see page 3 of the report"), as the executive summary should stand as an independent summary. The only exception is if there are safety considerations that you want to make sure your reader is aware of. Your textbook provides further information about executive summaries as well as an example. Please review your textbook and let me know if you have any questions.
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