Professional Business Analysts / Finding out

Questions that produce something

Most interview questions invite a description of the ideal.

Asking somebody what they need invites them to describe an improved version of what they have. Asking what is difficult invites a complaint, which is more useful. Asking what happened the last time it went wrong is better still, because it produces a specific narrative with details in it, and details are where the requirements are.

The most productive question in the discipline is some version of walk me through the last time you did this. It elicits a sequence rather than a summary, it surfaces the exceptions because a real instance contains them, and it is difficult to answer with generalities. It also puts the person on comfortable ground, describing something they know, rather than speculating about a system they have not seen.

The second most productive is asking what they would do if the system were unavailable for a day. The answer describes what actually matters, stripped of everything that is habit, and it usually names the one or two records without which the work stops.

Worth avoiding: asking somebody to rank a list of features. It produces a ranking, and the ranking is an artefact of the list you brought rather than of anything they believe.

It is also worth having one question in reserve for the end of any interview, which is what they expected to be asked and were not. It costs nothing, it frequently surfaces the thing they came intending to say, and it treats the person as somebody with a view rather than as a source to be queried. The answers are often the most useful part of the conversation, and they only appear because the question gave permission for something outside the agenda.