Easily, the most asked question in software.
The answer, not as easy to come by and is different for every company and team out there. It can range from the dev team to product management to support to sales to someone being sick to code not working to platform problems to project issues to anything and anything and anything.
That was a very long rambling sentence, but you get the idea, it’s not easy to answer.
When asked this question, my gut check, instant response is always the same.
Good question, better question – who knew when we were going to be late?
At this point, a few people will chime in and then the story starts to emerge as to why it happened, what lead to it, and most importantly who knew.
The question of who knew isn’t to assign blame and point fingers but to have a very simple follow-up.
What do we do better next time when you know?
Chances are, this person didn’t hold onto it for months on end. Chances are, they tried to talk with people or raise it up and no one wanted to hear the potentially bad news.
Chances are this might be the source of your problem
