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feeling was that it was not part of our charter to cross-train. I viewed this as
scope creep to our task.
CAUTION
Don't use a process writing working group to learn about what goes on with
other projects in the organization.
At the time, I was uncertain how I would have run the group differently.
Later when I was training these processes, I realized a more efficient
approach. In the training I began by asking questions of the group to see how
much of the process they could discover before we actually looked at the
process descriptions. I went to a white pad and said to the group:
We are now going to talk about the Design Process. Before we look at the
Design Process documented description, let's make a list of artifacts you pro-
duce and activities you conduct when you are involved in design work.
When they would have trouble, I gave them hints such as:
Does anyone else ever look at the design artifacts you produce?
This would remind them about reviews. I then might say:
Are there other things you do to ensure you have developed the right product?
This would remind them about demonstrations with a customer, and so on.
My questions helped to focus them on the things they should be thinking
about in writing or following a process. It usually would take less than 10
minutes to do this brainstorming in the training for a given process. We
would then open the actual process description, examining it to see how
close we came. In almost every case, we would have captured in 10 minutes
the essence of what was in a process that might have taken months to
develop with multiple two-hour process writing sessions.
Why could the people in the training group create almost the same processes
in much shorter time than the original process writing group? I believe the
answer was the way I asked the question in the training versus the way we had
conducted the original process writing working group. The working group
was too open ended. The training was very focused and kept people on task.
I decided, if this worked so well in the training, couldn't we potentially save
a great deal of time developing processes by using this same technique in the
process writing workshops?
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