Running the List

[mangosteen]

When I was in professional services, one of the things that I noticed I did was I ran a very specific list of diagnostics at the beginning of a customer meeting.

• Who is the most important person in the room?
• How technical is this group of people?
• What kind of mood are they in?
• Do they appear to be in a hurry, or are they settling in for the long haul

Comments

[asciikitty]

For the yarn business:

1. Is this a regular customer
if yes
1a. do they tend to need a lot of help
1b. do they tend to spend a lot of money

if no:
2. do they appear confused
2a. are they clutching a project with a panicky look in their eyes?

3. what's the dominate color they are wearing?
3a. are they happy and comfortable in their clothes

4. did they come in with a bored looking person or people

and then I ask "can i help you find something" or "how can I help you"

[also_huey]

- who in this room is going to ask the genuinely stupid questions, what are those questions, and how do I short-circuit them?
- who are the handful of people in this room whose opinions are relevant, what sort of mood are they in, and what sort of approach will best push them toward the right answer?
- what ulterior motives have been brought to this room? What are the real constraints, not just the ones that have been explained to me? Is there funding sufficient for the right answer, or is the half-assed answer the best I can hope to win?
- who is lying to me, and about what?

[beah]

When I have a new horseback riding student, I assess their level of physical fitness/stamina, their attention span, their level of diction, their ability to follow directions, their ability to do more than one thing at a time, and probably a lot more about their learning style and ability, so I can teach them effectively and keep them as safe as possible.

[siderea]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mental_status_examination

[vatine]

My day job involves running large-scale services (either backend systems for web services or web services). When we take on a new service, we have a fairly comprehensive checklist, but I shall condense it.

• Does the serviec have an SLA? (if not, why have we been asked to take care of it?)
  
• What is the demand driver(s)? (for a classic web service, this is, usually, "requests per time-unit") How does the demand correlate to resourec requirements?
  
• How many pages have the service generated recently?
  
• What internal metrics are exposed?
  
  • What internal metrics do we need exposed to measure SLIs and ensure we're within SLOs?
    
  • Are the metrics aggregated correctly?
    
  • Are alert thresholds even close to appropriate?
    
• Is the overall architecture suitable for needs?
  

None of those feel obscure to me, but I guess the focus on metrics may feel alien to some.