Quiz — Chapter 21: Workplace Reports

Target: 70%+ before moving on. Answers and explanations are hidden—try each before expanding.

Section 1 — Multiple Choice

1. The defining purpose of a workplace report is to: - a) Document how much effort the writer put in - b) Serve as an input to a decision the reader must make - c) Create a complete chronological record of the work - d) Demonstrate the writer's command of the subject

2. "Exception-based reporting" means: - a) Reporting only when something goes wrong - b) Making exceptions to the standard report format when needed - c) Spending detail on what deviates from the plan; compressing what's routine - d) Listing every exception thrown by the software

3. In RAG status, amber means: - a) The project has failed - b) At risk but likely recoverable without escalation; the reader should be aware - c) On track, no action needed - d) Waiting on someone else

4. The "watermelon report" problem is: - a) A report that's too long to read - b) A status that's green on the outside but red on the inside—reported green until it suddenly fails - c) A report with too many colors - d) An incident report that assigns blame

5. In an incident report, the timeline should contain: - a) Your analysis of why the incident happened - b) Factual, timestamped events with no interpretation - c) The corrective actions and their owners - d) An assessment of who was responsible

6. "Blameless" in an incident report means: - a) No one is held accountable for anything - b) The report attacks the system that allowed a human error to cause harm, not the human - c) The report omits any mention of what went wrong - d) Mistakes are never discussed

7. Which "Done" entry in a progress report is correct? - a) "Worked on improving the checkout flow" - b) "Spent time looking into the performance issues" - c) "Shipped the redesigned checkout flow; live to 100% of users Thursday" - d) "Continued making progress on the dashboard"

8. The single most important property of a meeting-minutes action item is: - a) That it captures the discussion that led to it - b) That it has exactly one named owner and a deadline - c) That it's written in complete sentences - d) That it records who proposed it

9. A feasibility study must always include: - a) Only the recommended option, argued thoroughly - b) The alternatives considered, including a "do nothing" baseline - c) A complete budget for the recommended option only - d) The author's personal preference, stated first

10. The cardinal mistake of a trip report is: - a) Being too short - b) The travelogue—a day-by-day diary instead of takeaways and recommendations - c) Including a recommendation - d) Naming the people you met

11. "BLUF" applied to a status update means: - a) Bury the lede until further detail - b) Put the overall status / headline first, so a reader who reads only the first line still gets the one fact that matters - c) Brief, lengthy, unstructured format - d) Begin with a list of all activities

12. Why do incident-report corrective actions and meeting-minutes action items both converge on an Action / Owner / Due table? - a) Coincidence of formatting conventions - b) Because the table format is the accountability—an action without one owner and a date is a wish - c) Because tables are required by most software - d) Because prose is never appropriate in reports

Section 2 — True/False with Justification

For each, state True or False and justify in one sentence.

T1. A status update where every workstream is green every week is a sign of a well-run project.

T2. The timeline and the root-cause section of an incident report can be safely combined into one narrative, since an expert reader can infer cause from the facts.

T3. Meeting minutes should record enough of the discussion that a reader can reconstruct the debate.

T4. A progress report and a status update are essentially the same document with different names.

T5. Naming who caused an incident makes the report more useful, because it tells the organization who to hold responsible.

T6. The amount of detail in a workplace report should scale with how much work the writer did.

Section 3 — Short Answer

S1. In one sentence, state the threshold concept of this chapter.

S2. Give the four-part skeleton of a progress report, and state the verb rule for one of those parts.

S3. Name the five sections of an incident report, in order.

S4. What four kinds of information do good meeting minutes capture, and what do they discard?

S5. Why must a feasibility study include a "do nothing" baseline?

Section 4 — Applied Scenario

AS1. Here is a narrative status item. Rewrite it as a single exception-based RAG line (color + tight note + a decision with owner and date if one is needed):

"The mobile app workstream is in a tricky spot. We integrated the new SDK but it's crashing on older Android versions, which represent about 30% of our users. We could either drop support for those older versions, which some stakeholders won't like, or spend about a week finding a workaround. We need to figure this out before the release, which is in two weeks."

AS2. A teammate wrote this incident-report root cause. Rewrite it to be blameless and to separate the fact from the interpretation:

"The outage happened because Jordan deployed an untested change on a Friday afternoon, which was a bad idea, and it broke the login service for two hours."

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