IT Lesson

Assessing your process 6 great questions

Recently, I was asked to work with a client to help them improve their process. In some of my other readings I found a list of 6 questions used by Alistair Cockburn in his research to search for the most successful properties of software methodologies. We used his questions to interview the team and found the results to be fascinating and useful. The interviewees took on average 3 hours to answer these 6 questions:

1. Please give me a brief history of the project: timeframes, changes in project size, problem domain, technology used, key events in the life of the project, the general approach.

2. What would you say are the things that worked in the project?

3. What would you say are the things that did not work well?

4. If you were going to start another project, or give advice to someone starting a similar project, what things would you be sure to put in place (recommend)? What are your priorities for those?

5. If you were going to start another project, or give advice to someone starting a similar project, what would you work (recommend) to avoid, or keep from happening?

6. What else?

Pretty simple list - I hope you find these useful as well.