What an Iraq operations report should show headquarters each month

Most Iraq reporting to head office is a narrative: what the team did, what went well, what was difficult. It is readable and it is almost useless for oversight, because it cannot be checked against anything.

A useful report has a fixed structure that does not change month to month, so the reader can see movement rather than prose.

The six sections

• Requests: raised, closed and outstanding, with dates. This shows volume and whether the backlog is growing.
• Deadlines: what fell due this period, what was met, what was missed and why. Renewals, permits, contract dates and filings all belong here.
• Procurement: orders placed, values, suppliers used, and every exception — single source, urgent, over threshold.
• Spend: by category, by supplier and by entity, with third-party costs shown separately from the service fee.
• Documents: received, held and released, with the custody register reconciled.
• Open actions: each with a named owner and a target date, carried forward until closed.

Why each section exists

Requests and deadlines together answer the question an auditor eventually asks: was anything missed, and would you know if it had been? A backlog that grows for three months is visible in the first section long before it produces a consequence.

The procurement and spend sections exist because local purchasing is where visibility is usually lost. An exception report is the single most useful page in the document: it lists every purchase that did not follow the normal route and says why.

What a good report makes unnecessary

A report that covers these six areas removes the need for most ad-hoc questions from head office, and it makes the quarterly governance review a discussion rather than a reconstruction.

It also does something less obvious: it survives a change of country manager. The report is the operation's institutional memory, and it is the reason a handover takes a week rather than a quarter.

Two things to insist on

First, that third-party costs appear separately from the service fee, on every line. A single blended figure cannot be benchmarked and should not be accepted.

Second, that the report is the same shape every month. A report whose structure changes is a report that cannot be compared, which defeats its purpose.