Telling Stories: A Short Path to Writing Better Software Requirements

Chapter 7. And Finally, the Beginning

When all the detailed content of your document is essentially complete, you're ready to seize your reader's attention and make your points with a clear and forceful executive summary. To write a great executive summary, combine your talent for telling stories with your rigorous analysis skills. Condense the conclusions of the project team to a very few brief recommendations and put them first, even if you may be uncomfortable strongly recommending something before building a case.

We often start documents with a lot of unnecessary background information. Have you heard this before?

Note

The issues surrounding account screening require thorough and thoughtful analysis. With the advent of money laundering issues in the wake of the increase in drug trafficking during the 1990s, as well as concern about the global flows of capital in support of terrorist organizations after the tragedies of 9/11, the firm has become concerned that greater efforts must be made in prevention of transactions with unverified counterparties. After reaching out to partners around the firm in an extensive effort involving stakeholders at every level of management, from associates to managing directors to clients, the Transaction Processing Improvement team (TPI) has initiated a ground-breaking process of recommendation for the next generation of . . . "

Please wake me up when we hit some information.

Like the first few pages of a good novel, the executive summary should be ...