[Sigia-l] Group interviews

[Seth Earley]

I have a client who is insisting on 15+ group phone interviews (5 or more
attendees each) of an hour duration.  I have never found these to be
effective other than to communicate project goals at a high level.  But not
to get meaningful information around requirements.  People say things for
political effect, they don't speak freely...  If we drill into too much
detail, it becomes in essence an individual interview.  In some cases the
audience is diverse so discussions of needs do not apply to all on the call.
They usually stay at a very high level and the answers are usually "we need
to figure that out" or "you need to get more detail on that", or "we need to
make the information easier to use", etc.

We will be doing individual interviews and selected group working sessions
but my feeling is that these group format phone interviews are not a great
use of time.

Has anyone made this format productive? What has made it useful?

Seth
Seth Earley
Earley & Associates, Inc
781-444-0287
781-820-8080 cell
Next taxo conference call July 27th 2 PM EDT
"Best Practices in Taxonomy Deployment"
Registration and agenda at
www.earley.com/events.htm
Taxonomy Community of Practice
http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/TaxoCoP/



-----Original Message-----
From: sigia-l-bounces at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-bounces at asis.org]On
Behalf Of Adrian Howard
Sent: Wednesday, July 20, 2005 7:18 PM
To: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Re: Project Management Software for MacOS X


On 20 Jul 2005, at 22:36, tOM Trottier wrote:
[snip]
> Depends on the project. The more players, the more need. The more
> distributed, the more need.

Yup. I'm not trying to say it's always unnecessary. It's just that I
find that the best approach is to try and remove complexity first,
rather than use project management software as the weapon of first
resort.

For example with distributed teams you can either:

1)    spend time and effort using a fancy (or not so fancy) groupware
app to integrate everybody's work.

2)    spend time and effort to persuade the organisation to colocate
the team, ideally in the same location as the client.

I've found it more effective to push hard on (2) before I resort to
software.

When I do resort to software I now tend to use small tools aimed at
solving specific problems rather than using some uber-solution that's
intended to do everything. These days my PM software tools of choice
are things like wikis, blogs, always-on VOIP lines between
development areas, etc.

> Project management software makes it much easier to see the effect
> of any delays or problems, to share info, to reschedule, and to
> manage the critical path.

And sometimes (not always) it's the moral equivalent of using Quark
to produce your shopping list. Massive overkill that gets in the way
of getting the job done.

> I've found it best to break the work down into very definable parts
> with deliverables or events marking progress and never to say xx%
> done. "xx% done" is not necessarily ever quantifiable in software
> projects.
[snip]

I agree. This is exactly what I do too.

Tasks go on the index cards. Nice graph of tasks completed over time
on the whiteboard. Use yesterdays weather to estimate how many tasks
we're going to complete each iteration. Divide into the number of
tasks to give an estimated release date.

I've been amazed how complex a project can get before you need any
more than this :-)

Adrian

------------
When replying, please *trim your post* as much as possible.
*Plain text, please; NO Attachments

Searchable Archive at http://www.info-arch.org/lists/sigia-l/

IA 06 Summit.  Mark your calendar.  March 23-27, Vancouver, BC


________________________________________
Sigia-l mailing list -- post to: Sigia-l at asis.org
Changes to subscription: http://mail.asis.org/mailman/listinfo/sigia-l