MBA project report format

The pages before Chapter 1

When examiners get the report, the front pages are the first thing they turn. They are checking signatures, dates and whether the names are correct. If the seal is missing on the company certificate, they will see it before reading even one table of your analysis.

The Bengaluru City University MBA guidelines give a clear order for these pages, and most colleges follow something close to it. First comes the cover page and the title page. After that the student declaration and the guide certificate, and then a certificate of originality from the head of the institution, on college letterhead. Next are the acknowledgements, table of contents, list of tables and list of figures. When the project was done inside a company, BCU also wants a certificate from your company guide. It has to be signed on the company letterhead and should say that you completed the work there.

We see two mistakes many times in these pages. The first one is dates. In one report the company certificate gave 2 January to 15 February, but in his declaration the student wrote three months for project. All the dates should match on every page. The second one is the title. Many students change the title in the middle, and the guide certificate still carries the old title. Finalise the title once and type it the same on every page.

Usually the front pages are numbered in small Roman numerals (i, ii, iii), and page 1 starts with Chapter 1. Not every MBA handout writes this, but it is common practice and examiners expect it.

The five chapters and how long each one runs

Five chapters is the normal count for an MBA report. In some colleges the second chapter is split into two, one for the review and one for research design, so the report has six. Both are accepted if your guide is okay with it.

Compared to most universities, BCU has written much more in its guidelines. They fix a share of the total length for each chapter. This helps even outside BCU, because it shows which chapter should be the heavy one. In the table below we have converted those shares into pages for a 100-page report.

Check the fourth row. Data analysis and interpretation takes 40% of the report. In many reports we get, it is reversed. There are 30 pages about the industry and the company, and only 12 pages of tables at the back. Such a report mostly describes the company. The examiner is looking for a problem the company is facing, studied with data that you collected.

Chapter 3: the company profile trap

Chapter 3 is in two parts. The first part is about the organisation, its history, products, structure and market. Then comes your respondents. Here you tell how many people answered and which departments they work in, with their age and experience. Most problems come in the first part.

Many students are writing the company profile by copying from the company website, the annual report or a senior’s project done in the same company. Similarity software will catch all of these. Your college may use Turnitin, DrillBit or Urkund for checking, and in the BCU guidelines the plagiarism report is one of the annexures. That means the examiner see those matches inside the same bound copy as your chapters.

Write the profile from your own notes and keep it short. Keep only the figures you are going to use later in the report, and cite the annual report whenever you take a figure from it. Even three pages in your own words is enough for this part, and examiners prefer that over twelve pages taken from the website.

The respondent profile is simpler. It is just the first few tables from your questionnaire, for gender, age group, department, years of service and income. Give one table for each item with one or two lines of reading below it. Use a pie chart only where it really helps.

Chapter 4: one objective, one set of tables

Most of your marks come from Chapter 4. Arrange this chapter by your objectives. Many students follow the question order of the questionnaire, and then the chapter becomes hard to follow. Take one example. If your objective 2 is “to study the relationship between training and job satisfaction”, section 4.2 should finish with a test that answers it, for example a correlation or a chi-square. Fifteen percentage tables will not answer that objective.

Every table in this chapter has three parts. There is the table itself with a number and a title, then a source line (“Source: primary data”), and then an interpretation of two to four sentences. Those lines should tell what the table shows. Reading out all the numbers once more in words is not interpretation. Our guide on reporting SPSS results shows how to lay out the test results. If you are still deciding which test to use, read choosing a statistical test.

These days percentages alone will not carry an MBA report. Examiners in most colleges want to see minimum one test answering a hypothesis. For most MBA projects a chi-square test of independence, a t-test between two groups or an ANOVA for three or more groups is sufficient. Some students run structural equation modelling just because a senior did it. Do that only if you can explain it in the viva.

Chapter 5: findings that match the objectives

The last chapter has findings, conclusion and suggestions. Findings are written as a numbered list of what your data showed, in the same order as the objectives. If there were four objectives, all four should come in the findings. Examiners check this by turning back and forth between Chapter 2 and Chapter 5.

Suggestions is the place where many students start giving general advice. “The company should improve employee welfare” is a line anyone can write without any data. A good suggestion comes out of a finding. For example, “Since 62% of staff with under two years’ service rated induction training as poor, the HR team could add a second induction week for new joiners.” Only your own data can give a suggestion like that, and examiners give credit for it.

For the conclusion, half a page or so is fine. After it, add a small list of limitations, and one or two lines about what a future study can look into.

Font, spacing, length and the abstract

In this part the rules actually differ from university to university. Take the figures below as examples and check with your own rules.

As per the BCU MBA guidelines, the report should be between 75 and 150 pages, in 12-point Times New Roman with 1.5 line spacing. The abstract must be under 150 words, with five key terms in the end of it. For the cover page there are separate type settings, Arial Narrow in fixed sizes for the title, the degree and the guide’s name. The bibliography follows author and year pattern, and they have given separate examples for books, edited volumes and journals.

BCU also has a shorter four-week project between the second and third semesters, and its report is 30 pages or more. Students sometimes take the page rules of that project and apply them to the dissertation, so please read the correct handout.

At Osmania, the MBA (Day) syllabus has a six-week summer internship between Semesters II and III. After that, the project report is written during Semesters III and IV with an internal faculty guide. The report has to reach the University 30 days before the final semester examinations begin. The syllabus mainly talks about timing and marks for the project, so the page format will come from your college.

For MBA reports at Anna University, Bharathiar University and University of Kerala, we could not find any official university format online as of October 2026. There, your college template is the rule. Ask the department for it in writing, and ask the similarity limit at the same time.

Annexures, and what to keep after you submit

Annexures come after the bibliography. Normally they include the questionnaire you used, the company certificate if it is not already in the front pages, the similarity report, and any long tables you shifted out of Chapter 4. Attach a blank questionnaire only, not a filled one. Respondent names should not appear in the bound report.

Do keep the filled questionnaires with you, though. BCU asks students to hold on to the filled questionnaires, interview recordings and other project material till their results are out. In the viva the examiners may want to see them. It is a good practice in any university. If you prepared the questionnaire on your own, read our questionnaire design guide for the questions examiners usually ask about it.

About similarity, Master’s students cannot open their own account on INFLIBNET’s ShodhShuddhi service. Its FAQ says UG and PG students are not eligible. So the checking is done on your college’s software. The BCU MBA guidelines allow a similarity index of 20%. If your university has not given any figure, the UGC 2018 regulations treat up to 10% as carrying no penalty, and they cover dissertations also, not only theses.

A last check before the report goes for binding

Once the report is bound, you cannot change anything. If the title on the spine has a spelling mistake, you have to bind a fresh set. Before going to the binding shop, take the printout and check these points on paper, not on the screen.

• Title should be exactly the same on the cover, title page, all certificates and the spine.
• Check that each certificate has a signature and date, and a seal wherever one is asked.
• Open the contents page and see if each page number there is the same as in the printout.
• Every table and figure carries a number and a title, and the lists of tables and figures agree with them.
• For each objective in Chapter 2, there is a finding in Chapter 5.
• All sources cited in the text are in the bibliography, and every bibliography entry is cited somewhere.

Some students come to us with only few weeks left and nothing written. For them we have a plan for finishing a dissertation in eight weeks. It tells which work to do first and what you can drop.