Same question, different people

[Stuart Burnfield <sburnf -at- au1 -dot- ibm -dot- com>]

Bill Swallow said:
> In short, it's amazing what you learn about a company's
> culture and your boss just by asking the same question of
> multiple people.

Bill was talking about asking questions at job interviews, but this is
equally true and even more enlightening once you start work.

When I started as a contractor I would try to talk to a range of people in
the company about their products, the market they were in, the main types
of user, and so on. I assumed that everyone who'd been there for a while
would have a similar view of these basics, allowing for some difference in
emphasis depending on what their role was. In fact I found that this isn't
the norm.

One example was a company that was embarking on a Grand Unified Project to
Rewrite Everything--new technical infrastructure, new development
environment, new products, and old products rewritten to run using the new
environment. I spent a couple of weeks asking questions and trying to
summarise the answers in a way that made sense. I sent around my summary
with a cover note saying, "Hi, I'm Stuart the new guy, this is my
understanding of where we're at now and where we're heading, please let me
know if there's anything I've misunderstood."

I got a lot of feedback, mostly positive, along the lines that "it's great
to have this clear summary that ties everything together, but you got some
things wrong". I was a bit dismayed by the number of these mistakes, but
when I went back to my notes they were nearly all plain statements that I'd
been told by someone in an interview or e-mail. What had happened is that a
sales guy was sure the new product would let customers do X, but the
developer came back with, "Well, yes, in theory it could, but in practice
it won't." The pre-sales support people thought there'd be a set of
functions built-in that the project manager said would have to be
customised on site. And so on. It wasn't just the new project, either. My
fairly bland description of a couple of existing products (who used them,
what for, how the market was changing) led to a heated disagreement between
Experienced Pre-Sales Guy and Experienced Professional Services Guy. Some
of the statements people objected to came from the product brochures and
web site!


I think this is a valuable service we TWs can provide. It's assumed that
everyone shares the same basic understanding of the company's market,
products and users. It's rare that anyone puts out a summary of this
information in a way that's clear enough to be understood by anyone in the
company and specific enough to flush out misunderstandings and
disagreements. The nice thing is that it's just a by-product of the user
and task analysis we do anyway.

You do need to hold your nerve. A couple of times I've sensed people
thinking, "This guy's been here for two weeks asking questions and he still
doesn't know what the project's about..."

Stuart

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