Five Ws
Comments(0) Popular in journalism, the Five Ws (also known as the Five Ws (and one H), or Six Ws) formula can be adopted in software project management.
- Who? Who was involved?
- What? What happened (what’s the story)?
- Where? Where did it take place?
- When? When did it take place?
- Why? Why did it happen?
- How? How did it happen?
Even short answer on each question above gives a good story on something happened. Especially if that took place unexpectedly. Documenting those answers could be very helpful to make a step forward and resolve the situation as well as better understand how to prevent similar issues in the future.
Speaking on preventing similar problems to occur. H. William Dettmer made a good point that manager’s value is assessed not by the importance of the tasks he\she is working on but whether he\she is solving the same issues multiple times.The quote is actually applicable to (software) engineers too who normally should resolve the problem for good instead of hiding it or inventing another ‘temporary fix’.