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MS Project questions

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Stoic Joker:
^Nailed it! :Thmbsup:

IainB:
@TaoPhoenix: Heh, heh. Apposite and droll.  :Thmbsup:

DerekHal:
Sorry. I thought this thread was about helping Kalos with MS Project. :down:

TaoPhoenix:
Sorry. I thought this thread was about helping Kalos with MS Project. :down:
-DerekHal (May 06, 2015, 12:14 PM)
--- End quote ---

Yeah, our tone is wavering a little, but it's getting into a broader theme of "answering the question" and "next steps".

I posted my remarks because in my old job we'd never needed MS Project for anything, then one day, *exactly once*, it drifted up through management "Hey, we need a chart." And never used it again.

So it happens. I've been in Kalos' position a lot, so a big "take months to learn MS Project" kind of reply would really have upset me! By now y'all see he's dealing with a lot of stuff. So to keep getting multi month homework assignments would start to get discouraging!

So on *these kinds of questions* I was trying to suggest we need a double-barreled answer - something to get past the week, and then what could be done later now that the meeting-fire is put out?

IainB:
Sorry. I thought this thread was about helping Kalos with MS Project. :down:
_________________________
-DerekHal (May 06, 2015, 12:14 PM)
--- End quote ---

My apologies. I can quite see why you would say/think this at this point. You are arguably not entirely wrong in your approach so far, nor entirely right. The focus is, or was, on helping Kalos with his questions.

After years of lecturing, consulting and generally trying to maintain a politely helpful and positive approach to people's questions (including being a Help Desk second-tier technical support specialist and a volunteer on aardvark, and setting up and managing Service Desk operations), I eventually decided on four basic rules:

* Rule 1: that there is no limit to our ignorance (including mine), and I should accept that;
* Rule 2: to limit the contribution of my cognitive surplus to such people and their infinite ignorance/questions, by encouraging them to take more responsibility for seeking out/discovering their own answers (which is how I generally go about reducing my own level of ignorance).
* Rule 3: that people generally seem to have little respect for and to have a limited capacity to internalise answers/knowledge which have come too easily to them, so generally avoid giving them any answers.
* Rule 4: in any event, avoid "telling them the answer" or pushing my opinion forwards without substantiation in theory, experience and good practice (this takes work to communicate).
When I have strayed from these rules, I have usually regretted it.

Therefore, IF I decide to assist people at all, then - and even if I think that I know the answer already - I nowadays usually google it or DuckGo it, or check Wikipedia (say) or RTFM for them, and then send them the results or source links, with the suggestion that  they could probably get even more useful information if they hunted around a bit more themselves or (say) played about with a google (or other) search string.

So where I do decide to help people with their questions, my greatest contribution is by doing what I have generally found to be most effective - simply stick with making the effort to try to help people to help themselves - and I put quite a bit of work into that effort.

Having been responsible for recruiting, managing and coaching project managers, for the coaching I would usually take the approach above, and which I also took in this case.
I suppose I could have added a reference to: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=MS+Project+Inside+Out

The implications of this would probably be apparent in the context of (say) this discussion thread.

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