A3 Reports: It's All About the Paper Size
I occasionally run into people who don't like the term "A3 Report" - they think it's an obscure title for a simple tool. An A3 report is a document written on either A3 (metric) or 11" x 17" (U.S.) paper - twice the size of letter paper - to capture the essential information about a problem under investigation or a piece of valuable knowledge. You can find examples of them here in my Resource Center.
I encounter a lot of people who want to call these things "knowledge briefs" or something similar. I'm normally fairly flexible about the language people use to describe their work. But I've been resisting this trend with my clients, for two reasons.
The first reason is that everybody else calls these things "A3 reports" - so if you want to find out how other people are using concise, visual reports to solve problems, you want to search on the term "A3 Report" to find the answers. For example, you'll find the excellent book released this year by Durward Sobek and Art Small called Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System.
However, that's not the only reason I resist. Answer this question: how long is a Knowledge Brief?
The only possible answer is "it depends on what you mean." However, an A3 report is - by definition - on A3 paper. If it's on letter paper, or it's two or five pages - it's not an A3 report.
The paper size drives the right behavior to foster rich discussion, true knowledge sharing and good decision-making: distill the problem to the essential information, keep all the essential information visible at all times and use visual models to improve the flow of knowledge. To describe your problem on a single sheet of paper, you have to think about what's essential, and you learn pretty quickly that it's easier to be concise when you use pictures and other kinds of visual models rather than text.
Occasionally, I'll run into a company that has difficulty with the paper size - maybe they don't have printers equipped to print that large, for example. However, the visual models on an "A4 Report" (letter sized or 8.5" x 11") have to be fairly small to fit, and the reports have to be distilled down to the point that essential information has to go on a separate sheet. If you print the missing information on the back of the "A4 report" you have just hidden essential information, since I can no longer see it all at once.
Rather than go that route, I would rather solve the mechanical problem of "how do I print on A3 paper?" The small expense of installing a few large format inkjet printers for A3 reports is far outweighed by the benefits of using a format that has been demonstrated to lead to faster, better decision-making.
I encounter a lot of people who want to call these things "knowledge briefs" or something similar. I'm normally fairly flexible about the language people use to describe their work. But I've been resisting this trend with my clients, for two reasons.
The first reason is that everybody else calls these things "A3 reports" - so if you want to find out how other people are using concise, visual reports to solve problems, you want to search on the term "A3 Report" to find the answers. For example, you'll find the excellent book released this year by Durward Sobek and Art Small called Understanding A3 Thinking: A Critical Component of Toyota's PDCA Management System.
However, that's not the only reason I resist. Answer this question: how long is a Knowledge Brief?
The only possible answer is "it depends on what you mean." However, an A3 report is - by definition - on A3 paper. If it's on letter paper, or it's two or five pages - it's not an A3 report.
The paper size drives the right behavior to foster rich discussion, true knowledge sharing and good decision-making: distill the problem to the essential information, keep all the essential information visible at all times and use visual models to improve the flow of knowledge. To describe your problem on a single sheet of paper, you have to think about what's essential, and you learn pretty quickly that it's easier to be concise when you use pictures and other kinds of visual models rather than text.
Occasionally, I'll run into a company that has difficulty with the paper size - maybe they don't have printers equipped to print that large, for example. However, the visual models on an "A4 Report" (letter sized or 8.5" x 11") have to be fairly small to fit, and the reports have to be distilled down to the point that essential information has to go on a separate sheet. If you print the missing information on the back of the "A4 report" you have just hidden essential information, since I can no longer see it all at once.
Rather than go that route, I would rather solve the mechanical problem of "how do I print on A3 paper?" The small expense of installing a few large format inkjet printers for A3 reports is far outweighed by the benefits of using a format that has been demonstrated to lead to faster, better decision-making.
Labels: A3 reports
posted by Katherine Radeka
at
10:04 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home