In the online help for RQM under the "Reporting" heading, there is the topic "Reporting test status with Rational Quality Manager". Most of the topics deal with the mechanics of the buttons and UI elements in the reports, dashboards, etc., or things as simple as "How to open a report". There is one topic which explains what to click to import reports from Cognos.

My question/problem/concern is that the help does not actually answer the *business* question "How do I report on test status in RQM?". There seems to be a dearth of information on this topic. What little I seem to find indicates the desire for end users to leverage Cognos to get what they are looking for.

We have put together a set of RQM usage guidelines in an attempt to actually get something consumable by the business owners to answer this question, but it feels very much like we're trying to put a square peg in a round hole. For example:
-Specific test plan and test case naming conventions to help identify distinct parameter values that might otherwise look exactly the same (e.g., two test plans with the same name but different category value data used to differentiate them during planning).
-The use of "weight =1" for all test assets in order to get a "count of tests passed/failed within a test plan" by using the included TER-based reports. (Management is VERY keen on knowing the % of test cases passing and failing within one or more test plans).
-The use of Suites in order to provide the ability to assign an owner responsible for executing tests when it is appropriate to execute.

Furthermore, with regard to all of the included "Requirements" based reports...they seem only to work with the "RQM requirements"...not with requirements tracked through RRC and linked over to RQM (using links of collections-to-plans or requirements-to-cases). If I expand my reporting view of the world to want to include requirements linked to RQM through the Cross-Server linking, is Cognos my only choice? The "Architecture" topic on custom reporting seems to indicate this is the only way to collect this information from all sources.

Perhaps there are some white papers or insight out there about these things, but the feeling my end users get when they start using RQM is "This is great, it's very open and flexible, I can test plan in any number of ways."
"Now it's time to execute tests...this also seems very flexible. But wait...do I need to use a Suite? TERs?"
"I've executed tests, saved my results...now what? How can I see how I am doing?"

Then they get to the help topic "Reporting test status with Rational Quality Manager", and they feel lost, because it does nothing to answer that question for them.

If I look only within the realm of RQM (ignoring RRC/RTC), are custom reports the only way to simply derive this information?

Is Cognos included (license/payment wise) with RQM?

I need to note that we are currently running RQM 2.0.0.1 iFix3 in production. There was an iFix released the day before our scheduled production installation and due to numerous problems with prior installs and upgrades we are vetting each release in a sandbox environment first--so even that iFix had to be postponed. That process takes time, and so we still don't have 2.0.1 up and running. I know there are always improvements, so if "upgrade to version xyz" is the recommendation, please point out the feature/report/etc. which drives that recommendation.

Any and all opinions/insight into this would be greatly appreciated, especially from the Jazz team here. Thank you.