1) Are our tasks aligned with the project objective?
2) Is my understanding, team’s understanding and customer’s understanding about the project is same?

I stand by the one dumb question I proposed on your previous post, Hal

I want to share with you 12 other dumbs questions I ask but this time when I do risk management workshops.

Here they are:

CLAUDE EMOND’S 12 DUMB QUESTIONS FOR SUCCESSFUL PROJECT RISK MANAGEMENT

(found my subject fo my next blog post on http://www.projecttimes.com , hehe. thanks Hal)

First I must say that I never use the word «risk» in those workshops, as people just hate to talk about them….a primitive type of magic thinking to the effect that if we talk about risks they will happen…so do not talk about them please !!!…a curious phenomenon since it is the contrary that will happen

I separated the dumb questions by risk management process step.

a) for risk identificaion (one dumb question)

1- Do you have any worries or concerns with respect to…?

b) for reality checking (little Ishikawa process here to find root causes and treat them instead of acting on symptoms – my little contribution to improving on the currently used and unsuccessful risk assessment methodologies): (one dumb question)

2- Why are you concerned/worried ? because of a past experience, a current state of affairs or an intuition about possible future events ?

On a 100 M $ project I looked at after a year since its start, this question helped me reduce the original 300 concerns or so found with the first question above to 67 root causes «in the present» or concerns based on past experiences ( I threw away nothing, many original concerns had a similar root cause)

c) for risk impact analysis: (four dumb questions)

3- What happens if we do nothing with respect to this concern ? and

4- Would it put the project objectives or part of them in danger?

(by now a root cause identified in the present, thus one that everybody can see, a «known-known» if we use the cryptic terminology of the seasoned PMP )…measures foreseen impact

5- If we do nothing, how fast can we be endangered ?

….measures urgency to act if we have to act

6- What is the probabilty this thing could happen if we do nothing ?

…measures probability. I delay talking about probability at the latest moment possible since this is highly fuzzy business and nobody sees the same future. But usually, if I got people to agree on root causes everyone can see in the present, they very rapidly agree about the impact of doing nothing about it, so the probability question is settled very fast, as everybody desires to act on the group-perceived danger of doing nothing

d) for risk mitigation/response: (3 dumb questions)

7- So, if we need to act, what do we do ?

8- Who is responsible to do it and report on it ?

9- When will that be done ?

Acting on perceived dangers or current problems is the real reason we do risk assessment workshops on projects. I say that because most organizations who have documented project risk management processes (not many) do not use them consistently, and most of the very few that do use them feel happy with stopping the process after producing those colorful red-yellow-green risk probability-impact matrices (that cannot be understood, by the way, by 15 % of the male population, the men who are color-blind). These nice looking matrices are useless if we do not act on them. So do something (which is only possible if all stakeholders agree to act on risk element….and they can only agree if they see the same present root causes and freak out when they see them). I got a complete risk response plan with 67 elements (dates, everything) on the 100 M $ project mentioned above, after a discussion of only 90 minutes or so because everybody (15 people in the workshop) knew that they had to act fast, all convinced they were of the dangers they all saw clearly in the «present situation» they at last shared on this project.

e) for risk response follow-up and adapting to new situations as they occur (so continuous risk assessment is required): (three dumb questions)

10- Does our mitigation plan works ?

11- if not, what do we do now ?

12- …and today, do you have any new worries or concerns with respect to…?

So here we PDCA everything again, a golden principle of Lean Project management, right, Hal ?

I like dumb questions. So useful when you ask them.

I got involved with the second phase of a major project with existing requirements documentation. I realized quickly that the documentation was not even near complete (!) and started fighting with our software provider and internal departments to get at least a big picture of all the elements we need. I thought we had it all. Everyone said the document was complete. Then I asked one dumb question:
“So, what reports are you using now that you’ll need with the new system?” – Wow!!! Amazing all the major issues that came to light based on that one question!! There were big features completely missing (I didn’t know about them, being relatively new in the company) and others they thought weren’t important that are going to be very difficult to solve.
Then I was talking to the software developer and asked another dumb question:
“Please, can you explain how you are going to solve this?” This led to a long explanation, followed by “Ok, but you mentioned X. Can you explain it?” and then “Can you explain Y?” which, at the end, led to us all realizing they had no clue what we wanted and none of us had realized we had not communicated what we wanted / had not been understood.
The good part? By recognizing it now, we still have a chance to “fix” it with low-cost and low-aggravation (nothing worse than getting a delivery and it’s useless!).

I recently posted an article on 100 interview questions to ask employers: http://www.basilv.com/psd/blog/2009/100-interview-questions-to-ask-employers

There are a number of questions relevant to project management – check out especially the sections on Management, Teams, and Project Management (obviously . I don’t really consider these ‘dumb’ questions

Hi Hal – three of my favorites:

1. What do you think we’re missing?
2. Is there anything bothering you?
3. Who else should we bring into this discussion?

1. What have I forgotten to ask?
2. Is anyone uncomfortable with any aspect of this?
3. Does anyone have any questions?
and my favorite:
4. How can we avoid having another meeting on this topic?

these work well for construction projects but can be generalized to any PM.

What are the main problems with the way things are done today?

Hi Hal,

“Is this project answering the right question?”

Great topic,
Alec