Getting it done your way — Asking the right Questions

I was often told that I should learn the art of asking the right questions.

For sometime, I wondered what is asking the right questions? In our world, isn’t it just asking “Can we send the build today for testing”, “Why we cannot complete the task assigned to us?”.

I work in IT as a Project Manager, and have realized acquiring this skill is one of the more vital skills to have. Why? because you need to get the work done. And, yes asking the right questions has its benefits.

We usually think that asking the right questions pertains only to our work life, but that’s not true. I have experienced the goodness of asking the right questions even in my private life.

I remember I had to raise a change request to my client for a new feature he wanted. I had asked the developer how much time it would take to develop that certain feature. He had given me an estimate of 6 days. This information seemed too abrupt to me, so I got into the nitty gritty’s and asked him “To give me the estimate in hours” when he did that it came up to 34 hours of work. I again asked him to list down in detail with task breakdown with hours against each task we would perform while developing the feature and it up to 24 hours.

Do you see what I did there? I knew the answer I was looking for, so I created my questions based on the information I wanted. Not blaming the developer here, often our team works on various projects so even for them to give us correct estimates can get confusing. This way we both got our answer and correct estimate.

I once used this technique with my house help and extracted the information I needed as to why she couldn’t make it work. It took a good 10 minutes of conversing but I knew what I wanted to hear and eventually it came from the horse’s mouth.

My 3 Tips on Asking Effective Questions:

1. How can you find the right questions to ask?

Good questions are clear, even if they are broad. They need to be linked not only to an over-arching objective but also to competitive issues, the challenges posed by current approaches, decision criteria, and the obstacles to adopting new solutions.

The best examples would be Doctors. Have you observed how they ask you clear cut questions about the issue you are facing?

Where is the pain?

Is it recurring?

Do you feel dizzy?

Have you had any outside food lately?

They can then diagnose the problem that you have a tummy issue. And they solve it by prescribing a medicine or therapy.

2. Always do your research — Know what your looking for.

Coming from a background where I never wrote one line of code, it was always easy for my team to take me for a ride and throw a few development statements at me so I get confused and buy into their thoughts.

I was a puppet to that a year back or so, but then with time I learnt and now I always do my research.

Usually when you know what you want, its easier to frame the questions. The biggest problems that we face are we dont know what the issue is, so how do we find the solution. The solution is always the easier of the two.

Take an everyday example: You have to send a project plan for a new project where the client nor the team has full clarity on what needs to be developed. They just know the feature list, but that will not suffice in building a product. What do you do? You have crossed that stage of asking questions, gathering requirements now ? I would make my QA write down a very detailed Acceptance Criteria of the application, and even mention her assumptions with queries against them… why assumptions? as subject matter experts we need to lead our clients.This will help them in verifying our assumptions at a detailed core level of the product.

I would send the AC’s to my client and ask her to verify each and every feature detail within a given time. This way she will understand and know what we are going to develop and change any section that might not match our criteria.

3. Be Clear — Always be Specifically to the point

Its not easy being clear about questions. We usually beat around the bush because we dont want the receiver to judge us or think otherwise. But that’s the easy way out.

As a Leader you need to be very clear on what you expect and it should come out in your questions.

You might feel embarrassed about asking for clarification because you see it as revealing a gap in your understanding, but there are ways to de-emphasize this.

By being specific you can demonstrate the understanding you do have, and make it easier for the speaker to answer you.

For example, rather than asking “Can you explain the problem with X’s view again?”, aim for something more like: “When criticizing X’s view you made a distinction between [concept a] and [concept b], but I’m struggling to see the difference between them — could you go over that again?”.

This is developed with practice and experience. Before you ask a question write it down and evaluate if this will serve your purposes of getting the information you need.

Sadly, no school or colleges teach us this art of asking the right questions. We evolve and learn through our experiences. These tips have helped me evolve in my work and made me for efficient in solving problems.

Do let me know what you think of my article, keep reading!