All too often I will get pulled into a meeting where I am told we need to (generically) report stats or need to write up an explanation. What is even scarier is that others in the meeting will proceed to do just that without once pausing and asking who the stats or explanation are for.
Say it is a website we are reporting stats about, so we choose to report stats around the number of users and some basic demographic information. This information is great and something we should have on hand for understanding our users, the marketing department or the our senior management would certainly love it. But, after building the report, you learn that it is for finance. Finance does not care about the number of users – unless you are telling them the variable cost per user maybe. What finance really wanted to know was how much the website was costing to operate and how the cost is trending in comparison to the yearly projection. These costs are not something the marketing department would care about; unless it came out of their budget.
Whenever you jump into an existing project or are just starting one, it is good to pause and ask who is the audience for this? Sometimes that audience is a single person and sometimes it is a group. For a new product, your CEO might want a general overview of the project and the value added to the company, the CTO an explantation of the technology selection, CFO a model explaining how much the project will cost and when, CRO will want to know how they can market and sell the product, and so on. In this case the report should really be several areas that each stand on their own and are clearly labeled so the correct audience can quickly find the section they care about.