I Have Some Questions

Sun, Oct 9, 2022 Butch Howard

Tech

5 Magic Questions

1. How are you feeling about your life at work?
2. How are you feeling about your work-from-home set up?
3. How are we performing as a company?
4. What is it like to work with the rest of the team?
5. What is it like to work with me?

Matt Schnuck about Matt Mochary

5 Big Questions

1. What’s the business benefit of what we are doing? (The Value Story)
2. What is the total investment (in dollars, and where is that money coming from)?
3. How does it relate to the customer’s strategy?
4. When will we be done?
5. How will we know we have achieved the business outcome?

From the Pillar days. Bob would make sure we could answer these questions at the start of any project.

Story-Card 3 Amigos Questions

1. What is the business value?
2. How will this be accepted/ how to demo?
3. How will this be tested?
4. Any dependencies?
5. What data do you need and where does it come from?
6. Any business rules to be aware of?
7. Can this be broken down?
8. Is there an edge case that we can postpone?
9. Is this critical to the MVP/Is this the highest priority work we can be doing?

From the Pillar days. I don’t recall the source for these. Possibly Steve Turley.

Theory of Constraints 4 questions

1. What is the power of the technology?
2. What limitation does the technology diminish?
3. What rules enable us to manage this limitation?
4. What new rules will we need?

Questions from Those Questions

1. Understand the power of the technology.
   1. What does it do?
   2. How does it work?
   3. Will it work this way for you, too?
   4. How can we exploit this technology?
2. Recognize the limitation the technology will diminish.
   1. How can you prove the limitation was holding you back?
   2. How could you know it was diminishing?
   3. What can you measure [to show that diminishment]?
   4. What is your control group (how do you know this is not a fluke)?
3. Identify the existing rules we use to manage the limitation
   1. How do they get in the way?
   2. What assumptions do they make?
   3. Who owns the rules?
   4. Who might be threatened by dismantling them?
   5. How can we make it safe to change?
   6. How do we create a graceful exit?
4. Implement new rules.
   1. How can we safely exploit this new technology?
   2. What contraindications should we look for?
   3. How do we introduce and institutionalize these new rules?

“Technology can bring benefits if, and only if, it diminishes a limitation.” - Eli Goldratt