Drop the question and you have SCR: situation, complication, resolution. You haven't lost the question. It goes implicit, and the reader supplies it in the half-second between the second sentence and the third.
When should you use SCR instead of SCQA?
Compression isn't free and it isn't always right, so the rule needs stating with care. Use SCR when the question the complication forces is obvious to this reader. It nearly always is when they've been living with the problem. Use the full SCQA when the complication could reasonably provoke two different questions. Then you're choosing which one to answer, and the reader deserves to see the choice.
The saving is measurable. Harborline's chief executive gets a note before the board meeting. As SCQA it runs 132 words and reads in 36.0 seconds at 220 words a minute. As SCR it runs 79 words and reads in 21.5 seconds. That's 53 words and 14.45 seconds saved, a 40.2% cut, and across the nine people on the distribution list it returns 2.17 person-minutes.
In absolute terms that's small, so why bother? Nobody adopts SCR to save two minutes. They adopt it because a 79-word note gets read on a phone in a taxi, and a 132-word note gets marked unread and opened at 11pm, if at all.
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Where does SCR fit, and where does the question earn its place?
SCR is the standard form in three places. An email or a covering note, where the reader is scanning. The first paragraph of a one-pager, where the pyramid's top two levels follow immediately underneath. And the opening thirty seconds of a spoken presentation, where a stated question sounds rhetorical, and rhetorical questions cost the speaker credibility they'll want later.
There are two places where the question is worth its words. One is a mixed audience, where the two halves would ask different questions. Stating the one you answered stops the finance side from spending your whole slot waiting for a question you were never going to reach. The other is a question that's uncomfortable to ask. Writing it down is a form of commitment. "Should we close the general trade channel?" is harder to walk back than an unstated implication, so it belongs on the page.