Some questions you don’t want to ask.

When trying gather information regarding project status or work accomplished is to ask something vague. Questions like “how’s it going?” are bound to result in and unhelpful and useless answer (“great.. its going great”). It gives rise to irritation because while asking for the work you’re also asking for some writing composition and generally giving the sort of exam we all dreaded in college — the open discussion.

I was recently asked “where are we?” by a client who could have very easily been asked the same thing. Its really hard to know where we are if there is no reference point.

Sure, Please just give me a simple list of the main things yet to do. I’m aware of the Google map needing work but other than that I think we’re done … [You] really need .. to start using it and making simple one line bug fix requests in the group. General questions like ‘where are we?’ take some time to answer because we have to figure out what you mean and step back through the conversations and go all the way back to the original bid.. ect. So it can take a month to answer something that you might mean in a simple way but we just don’t know. So rather than toss of a curt and unhelpful answer we have to go back and reconstruct from the beginning . Right now it would be in your interest to just supply a list of things that are relevant and within the project scope. Simple one line things are best.