Experimental

First service-reports cell. Graduates to convention after 2 SE-produced reports ship using these patterns.

Service Reports

A Verdigris service report is a multi-page leave-behind produced by Solutions Engineering for an existing customer. It carries methodology + threshold-anchored findings + spotlights + reference. The register is operational-diagnostic: the report identifies what to investigate; the customer’s engineering team decides what to do.

Service reports are event-driven (an account question needs unblocking) rather than scheduled. The audience is the customer’s engineering / facilities team — people who can act on the findings if they trust the methodology. Trust is the load-bearing element: every finding must trace to a citable threshold, every flagged unit must show peer comparison, and the remediation register stays “investigation candidate” rather than “replace this equipment.”

Pick the genre

Currently one genre. Future candidates documented below as anticipated; do not invent a genre that isn’t here.

Genre	When to use	File
`portfolio-diagnostic`	Survey-shaped findings across an existing customer’s full deployment. Multi-tier categories (whole-system patterns + unit-level investigations). 1-2 spotlights with figures.	portfolio-diagnostic.md

Anticipated future genres (not built)

single-site-investigation — deep dive on one site / one finding (collapse the spotlight pattern to fill the document).
compliance-audit-report — regulatory-driven (LL97, IEEE 1547); regulation as threshold anchor; compliance gates replace category buckets.

These are not built yet. If your shape matches one, file an issue against the cell rather than coercing the existing genre.

Decision tree

Are you producing a multi-page leave-behind for an existing customer’s engineering team?
- No → see “When to use this cell” below for redirects.
- Yes → continue.
Is the report covering an existing customer’s full deployment with multi-tier findings (some system-level, some unit-level)?
- Yes → portfolio-diagnostic is the genre.
- No → the genre you need may not exist yet. File an issue describing the shape rather than mis-fitting portfolio-diagnostic.

When to use this cell

Use service-reports when:

The artifact is a leave-behind for an existing customer’s engineering team
The register is operational-diagnostic (findings + methodology), not editorial (whitepaper) or conversion (sales deck)
The report identifies what to investigate, not what to replace
The threshold anchors are citable (industry standard, regulation, internal benchmark)
The audience is the customer’s engineering / facilities team, not the prospect-evaluator audience for case studies or the policy audience for whitepapers

Use whitepapers when the artifact is editorial / thought-leadership for a research, policy, or industry audience. Use case-studies when the artifact is outcome-proof for a prospect audience (one customer, one anchor metric, retrospective). Use slides when the artifact is a live presentation or dual-use deck.

Confidentiality

Service reports default to CUSTOMER-CONFIDENTIAL. The tier color signals tier without requiring the reader to parse the text. Inheritance from composition.persuade-slide-deck.confidentiality-marking keeps the marking discipline consistent with sales-collateral cells.

If a report needs to be shared as an example in this cell’s examples/ directory, follow the anonymization checklist in the examples index — engagement-shape preservation with full identity substitution.