Have you ever had a rework situation at work? Thinking that the other person meant what they said, they tried to do it, only to be asked to redo it anyway. Even if you do exactly what the other person says, you still have to rework it.

I'm sure we've all experienced this in our regular work.

Why is rework a problem? It's because whether you're dealing with people outside the company or inside the company, you don't have a clear understanding of what is essentially what the customer wants for themselves and what is really necessary.

That's why, when the results are presented to the client in a tangible form, they say things like, "That's not what I want," "It would be nice to have more ......." "It probably won't work if you do it this way" ......

But it's a waste of time and effort to go through rework every time you have to do a job that's hard to do.

Getting to the heart of the matter by asking questions

If the other side asks "I need a piece of information", we need to know that there are differences in the content of the information itself, and that some of it is just for reference, and some of it is to assist in making a judgment call.

This is the first time I've seen a request for a copy of the book.

Therefore, we can flexibly use the "5W1H" questioning method to accurately capture the background of the other side of the request, that is, what is the nature of the work.

Question example:

Where is this information to be used? (Where)

What is this information used for? (Why)

Giving assumptions in the form of questions

In terms of the content of the information provided to the customer, even if we ask the question: what must be in it? The answer is probably just "you'll have to figure it out". If we don't know the specifics or the purpose, we don't know what to focus on in the material.

In this case, we can ask a question that gives us a hypothesis, which helps us understand the context and nature of the request.

For example, we could hypothesize that the information is needed for an internal meeting. If so, wouldn't it be easier to get it passed at the meeting if we included comparative charts or data?

Testing this hypothesis

Based on this hypothesis, we can ask the other party, "Is it necessary to include comparative data with other companies?" If we happen to get to the point, we'll get an answer from the other side that says, "It's hard to get passed at the meeting without objective data, so as long as you don't leave anything out when you're doing the information, you're doing me a big favor."

By asking questions like this to validate our assumptions, we can effectively reduce the probability of rework on the job.

The "Questioning Trilogy" described here is the basic steps for asking questions at work.

Have you ever had a problem with this in your daily work?

Leaders assigned to you a task to complete a work report, and then you understand in accordance with their own to do, spend a lot of thought, but also under a lot of energy to prepare. When you are not easy to complete, full of expectations sent to the leadership, thought the leadership after the eyes will be greatly appreciated, the results of the feedback received is that the work of the report and he wanted to deviate a lot, you spent half a day of hard work to do out of the leadership is not what you want.

Typically, what would you choose to do? Take it back and continue to ponder the idea of leadership, and then change it yourself?

If reworked many times, it is likely to make you feel that the value of your work is not great, and the output is not proportional to the effort, and the task is not completed smoothly, so that you have a sense of frustration, and may even be brought to the cranky mood because of the repeated modifications and conflicts with the leadership, which in turn affects your career development.

The truth is that the issue of work rework is completely within our control. The most important thing is to capture the essence of the need for the task, rather than seeing on the surface what the other person wants, and we do what they want.

In our daily work, there are two reasons for rework: one is that we start blindly without understanding what the other person wants, and the other is that the other person doesn't know what the core need is, so they don't express it clearly, which leads to a bias in our understanding.

What can we do to complete the task efficiently and avoid unnecessary rework? This is where the method of capturing the core requirements in the original article comes in.

How can we capture the core requirements? The author gives the following three steps:

1. Capture the core requirements of the task: questioning through 5W1H

For example, the leader wants you to come up with a departmental profile, you need to think about what is needed for this profile? （What is it used for? (why) in what occasion? (where) to whom to show it? （When will it be used? (when) How can it be used? (how)

When someone assigns us a task, we can avoid rework by capturing the core requirements of the task in the three steps in the original article.

Last month my leadership arranged for me to attend an education forum and complete the corresponding minutes. In order to do a good job of recording the meeting, I recorded the entire meeting, carefully taking notes, and after the meeting was over I carefully listened to the recording over and over again, and it took me a week to finally write more than 100 pages of the content of the meeting record. I think the content of these records is detailed enough, the leadership must be very satisfied. After finishing, I sent the minutes and recordings, photos, PowerPoint and so on to the leader. I didn't expect that the first effective feedback I got from the leader was that I had too much content and no focus, so I felt particularly disappointed on the spot, and felt that what I had done with a lot of effort was only added to my hard work on the leader's side. Afterwards, I redid the second version of the record on my own understanding and sent it to the leader, who then did not continue to reply to me.

Reflection:

This week, I need to complete 1 product description manual for a big data platform for universities

Goal:

By applying the 3-steps in the snippet, I can clarify the final standard to be achieved by the production of the manual, and do it without reworking. successfully completed without rework.

Actions:

Measurable Criteria:

Complete this product manual by Friday and have it successfully accepted by leadership.