One should never really stop asking questions, but many still forget to get a few key ones answered. Even though they seem obvious, at least a few of these questions seem to be overlooked in many projects. Whether you are the Project Manager, Project Tech Lead or even the Product Owner make sure these questions are being asked and answered.
If You Follow Agile – Scrum
- What did you COMPLETE since our last scrum?
- What will you COMPLETE before our next scrum?
- What are your blockers?
Before Project Begins
- What is the launch date? What is driving that date?
- What are the success criteria, business goals and drivers for the project?
- How many resources do I have, how much money?
- Who edits or maintains the site now, and have they used a CMS before?
- Is there an easier solution?
- When will designs be final?
- When will designs be FINAL FINAL…?
During Project
- What are my teams blockers, and how are they affecting the schedule?
- Where can I get a list of all the current site URLs?
- Do we really need X number of modules/plugins/libraries to do this piece of functionality?
- That modules/plugins/libraries is still in (dev/alpha/beta), do we have time to fix issues?
Toward Project Completion
- Are there any promotions or newsletters going out close to launch? Reschedule them!
Launch Planning
- What is our rollback plan, has it been tested?
- What is our cutover plan? Who is responsible for each step?
- How long is the TTL on the domain?
- Who is checking the robots.txt file?
- What is team member [1-N]’s contact information?
- Who is making sure the beer stays cold?
After Launch
- Did we meet our success criteria?
- What could we have done better as a team?
- What could we have done better as an individual?
- Who is tracking 404s or other errors?
- How do our metrics look?
- Traffic, bandwidth, SEO, etc.
Photo: Santos “Grim Santo” Gonzalez (CC BY-SA 2.0)
