“It depends.” The unfortunate answer of some consultants to questions that they frankly don’t know the answer to. I would be lying if I said I have never used those two words in front of a client before. However, over the past few years I have made a personal pivot away from this oft used response.
In my experience I’ve found that clients want answers…NOW!!! I think this has led many of us in the consulting community to generate half baked answers when put on the spot. Thus, the famous “it depends” response was born.
I’ll propose something different. Just be honest and provide principled guidance. Personally, I use the Scaled Agile Framework’s House of Lean and Agile Manifesto as the foundation of my thinking. Both provide a mature set of principles that complement one another very well. The key word there is principles. When we get pressed for answers we don’t know, we can be simply honest and say, “I don’t have a great answer for you. However, lets take a look at how that suggestion would align with our set of Lean|Agile principles.”
I would then suggest we guide our clients through some principles in the context of the their possible decisions. For instance, a few weeks ago I was asked to help define an engineering plan for a continuous delivery architecture. This is not a trivial question and it certainly does not have a trivial answer. On top of that, deployment pipelines are context specific to your system. Since I did not have a deep understanding of my client’s system, my response back was largely based around my knowledge of continuous delivery systems and Lean principles.
- I asked questions like:
- How do tooling decisions effect feedback speed.
- What is the “u-curve” optimization for manual test feedback cadence within the pipeline?
- How is management going to encourage and support the whole team to develop a “push” mentality and a collective ownership culture?
By answering some of these questions we were able to design a high level architecture that allowed for the delivery of small grained changes to my client’s system with incredibly fast feedback. I found this a much more satisfying way of answering questions I didn’t have the answer for. Not to mention my client and I were able to learn together!
