Defining the interview's purpose

- Isn't it funny how we need to get approval to expense a few hundred dollar item like software or training, but we can schedule meetings with others and waste their time without any approval. The cost of a single meeting with just a few people is in the hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. When you schedule meetings to interview someone or a group, you need to ensure you're using the organization's resources effectively and plan for that meeting. A great step in doing this is to be intentional and to find the purpose and objective of your interview. You do this by asking the question, "Why do I need to meet with this person?" And take this even further and ask yourself, "How will this person benefit from meeting with me?" Without answers to these questions, you risk wasting the organization's money and resources. I want to take a look at a few common interview purposes and objectives. One purpose may be to begin building a relationship with a stakeholder, especially those you don't know or haven't connected with in a while. Another may be to get an idea for the various solution options and alternatives that should be considered. Even if a potential solution has already been discussed, it's always okay to discuss additional options and alternatives. This gives us critical context to ensure we fully understand the problem. Meeting with a sponsor is a key person to interview. When meeting with a sponsor, you may want to understand how the project fits into her strategic plan. You also want to understand the goals, objectives, and vision they have for the project and solution. In essence, it's asking them, "Why are you spending your budget dollars on this effort "and what do you hope to gain?" When meeting with managers and leaders of teams impacted, you'll want to understand their pain points. Ideas and perspective on how things can be improved. And when meeting with user representatives, it's important to understand their pain as well. Their ideas and perspectives on what can be improved is also important. With users it's also helpful to understand the details of how they perform their work. Typically, this detailed dialogue on how they perform their work is a separate interview than the other purposes. Now that you have a solid purpose and objective for your interview, it may help to develop an interview plan. In this example, the sample interview plan lays out the basic information about the logistics, as well as the purpose, of the interview. I know my days get busy. It's easy to lose sight of why I scheduled something two weeks ago. This can be something you even add to the meeting invites. In this example, my date and place are to be determined yet. I've just working on planning the interview at this point, so I list the project name, who I'm interviewing with, perhaps what their role is, and then the purpose of the interview. And this really just helps me stay organized, keep focused on what the interview's about, and who I'm interviewing. I also want to leave space for my key questions, which I'll be determining a little bit later. Once you have an interview plan started with the stakeholder and objective, there is one more check to perform. Check to ensure that the interview objective is aligned with the project and solution objective. In this case, we can look back to the project charter, notes from previous meetings, or correspondence from project manager or sponsor, and make sure our goals and objectives are aligned. Sometimes your initial interview is just to discover what the project and solution objective are. Defining the purpose and objective of an interview is a crucial step to ensuring you don't waste anyone's time. If you do this consistently, you'll be known as someone who respects other's time and your colleagues will gladly accept your interview requests.