Common Questions for New Projects

The following are some useful questions that you may wish to review before starting a project.

• How often is the project going to be maintained?
• Is there a developing/Testing environment available?
• Where do I access to this particular information?
• Who have this particular information?
• How do I access to this particular information?
• Whom I have to talk to?
• Who made the decision?
• Is this the best solution for this problem?
• Are there backups?
• Is there a backup system that we can use before starting working on the project?
• Who is going to assign the roles and responsibilities?
• Are all team members familiar with the project?
• Are parameters of the project unlikely to change?
• Is this a large project team?
• Is the project process thoroughly documented?
• Is the project manager experienced in other project methodologies?
• What are we getting ourselves into?
• What impact is going to be?
• What are their expectations from the project?
• What are their expectations from us?
• Where is the list of TODOs located?
• What is going to be involved in maintain the solution?
• Are they maintaining and we are just configuring?
• Are we just going to administrator and maintain this project?
• Are we taking over this project?
• Do you understand that system administration is not an operation?
• This is too generic. Would you mind to explain exactly what is your expectation from us?
• What do you exactly need us to do?
• Where does it say in the document?
• What are we purchasing?
• Who is trained on this?
• Is this the way we really work?
• Am I involved in this project?
• Who is involved in this project?
• Can we break this in chunks?
• How much do we know is going to take if we don’t know what is going to be implemented?
• Would be this be sufficient and not customizations would be required?
• How is going to be maintained?
• How do they put the extended functionality?
• For how long the extended functionality would be available?
• How much times do they except us to put on it?
• How much do they charge us? It is too low or too high?
• How much do we charge them? It is too low or too high?
• What are we signing on?
• Are we going to be the administrator of this system?
• Are we going to be the developers of this system?
• Are we going to be the administrator and developers on this system?
• Who are we making these questions for?
• Is the process map out?
• What do they need to know and want to hear?
• What’s their preferred way of receiving information?
• What may prevent them from listening to what you have to say?
• How will you know that they got the message?

© 2014, Alejandro G. Carlstein Ramos Mejia. All rights reserved.