What to leave out of a report pack

A report pack is a document someone will read when they are not in the yard. That reader is impatient and correct to be impatient. They want to know what is wrong, what is waiting, and whether the round happened. They do not want to admire the forty checks that passed, not on page one, not before coffee.

We learned this from the wrong packs, including some we generated ourselves in 2024. They were complete. Completeness is a moral stance that makes bad PDFs. A complete pack that opens with a wall of “pass” trains the reader to skip, and once they skip they will skip the one fail you buried on page six because the route order put it there. Route order is the right order for the walk. It is the wrong order for the first page of the reading.

So the pack, as of release 2.6, opens on open deficiencies, holds, failed checks, and skips. Passes follow, still in route order, still in the file. Nothing is deleted to make the front short. The front is a sort. If you need to show an auditor that the other checks happened, they are there. They are not the headline. The headline is the unfinished part, because the unfinished part is why you wrote anything down.

What I will leave out, even from the back, is a photo with no asset and no reading, promoted as if it were evidence. It can be an appendix line: unlabeled photo, this visit, this person. It does not get a full page and a caption we invented in the office. Inventing captions is how packs become fiction. June has the harder essay on this, a photo is not a record. I am only deciding the layout. The layout should not launder a file into a fact.

I will also leave out the executive summary that restates the list in softer words. “Overall the system is in good shape with some areas for follow-up” is a sentence that protects the writer and wastes the reader. If there are two open items, the first page has two open items. If you need to tell the board what you will do about them, write that yourself, as Helen Park does at East Ward. We will not generate her note. A generated note is a way to sound responsible without being the person who will take the outage.

Counts belong in the pack if they are counts of the file: 18 checks, 16 pass, 1 fail, 1 skip, 2 open from earlier. Counts do not belong if they are scores. A score invites a target, and a target invites someone to close an item to move a number. I have seen a “health percentage” do this on a campus that will remain nameless because the percentage was not ours. The open list moved people honestly. The percentage moved them to close a trap as “monitored,” which was not a state in their procedure. It was a state in the score.

Leave out other people’s routes. A Tuesday pack is Tuesday. A monthly substation pack is the substations. A combined “everything this week” PDF is how a reader misses the reservoir. If you want a week, send three packs and a sentence. The sentence is yours.

Leave out advice. The pack should not say “consider replacing the packing.” The reading says there is a drip and the limit says there should not be. The owner is on the deficiency. Advice in the PDF becomes the vendor’s voice in a document that ought to be the crew’s. If our software starts suggesting repairs, this essay is void and I will be annoyed in writing.

The test I use before we change the template is to hand the PDF to someone who did not walk the route and ask them, after one minute, what is open. If they tell me about the passes, the template has failed, however tidy it looks. Tidiness is cheap. The minute is the whole product.

Riverward’s aide used to spend the hours building a document that failed this test, because the raw material was notebooks. The hours went away when the sort was automatic. The judgment did not go away. Dana still decides what can wait. The pack just stops pretending that the decision is a typing job.

If you are configuring this tomorrow, do less. Turn on the pack. Read the first page with the person who receives it. If they ask where the passes are, show them the back. If they ask where the open items are, we have a bug, and I want the file.