Questioning as a way of life

	Gieno  Management : Questioning as a way of life
	There is a great question and scenario that I'm sure quite a few TechLeaders deal with on a daily basis. There is a soft skills training in my last company titled "Precision Questions and Answers". I have not personally attended the training. Of late, I keep wondering if it will make sense for me to attend this training. Let me jump to the reason.  Of late, I have been wondering as to how much of my job is purely based on sheer questioning skills. Here are some examples of questions that are part of my day-to-day activities: "Hey, how is the next release on XYZ application coming up?" Vs "Hey, did you guys freeze on the design of your Rules Engine for the upcoming release of XYZ?" Now, if I ask the first question, the developers (who are normally a shy breed and always want to valiantly fight till the last moment) would just say "It's going fine". For the 2nd pointed question, the answer I would get is: "It's fine; but just that there are two different thoughts on implementation of the object model changes". Now, that is a conversation opener. The second style of questioning leads me into further deeper conversations that will open up a whole new design discussion and debate. In a structured program review, an inevitable question is: "What is the status of ABC component?". The typical answer from the developer is: "It's done". Now, if you, as a manager are going to be satisfied with this answer, you will go forward with other topics. Or, if you are a paranoid guy like I am, then you would ask the next "peeling" question: "What do you mean by 'Its done'?". Now, the developer might say something similar to this: "Well, I am code complete and the review and unit testing ONLY are pending". Now, this gives you a much more clearer picture of where your ABC component is. The fact that this answer would have just blown me crazy is a different topic altogether!! Whatever the answer, I have always found that "peeling" questions end up giving you a lot more clarity on where things are.  When I come to think of it, this has pretty much become the way I gather my information on all the apps that I am responsible for. After sometime, I realized that, just by asking a lot of questions (some of them meaningful and a lot more that are annoying to me) I have built my knowledge on the apps that I'm working on. And on more occasions than not, it has helped me do some course corrections if things are not shaping up the way they are supposed to be. Sometimes, I used to wonder as to how I was sure a particular piece of code or a component was developed the way it was without even having looked at that code! Is it good or bad? I don't know. All I know is, it has worked for me and is continuing to work. Obviously, it is not humanly possible for anybody to look at all the code 10+ developers are working on.

转载于:https://www.cnblogs.com/gieno/archive/2009/07/24/1530181.html