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Crafting the Interview Guide
Purpose Statement
The interview guide should include a single sentence purpose statement. The book gives several sample templates for the structure of these sentences but they generally breakdown into:
To Verb for gaining information Customer Focus in order to Business Focus
A simple An overly simplified example of this from my own recent projects would be:
To discover the methods and standard practices that the MRC uses to provide AV and technical support to events in order to help design a system which will automate and track equipment/inventory as well as provide additional billing capabilities.
Interview Objectives
Beyond a high level purpose statement to the entire interview visit. There should be several more tangible, measurable objectives listed for the interview. These items should support the purpose statement. Basically we are crafting the list of information we have to acquire to have a successful interview. There should be between 5 and 10 interview objectives.
Continuing the MRC Example for bullet point objectives:
- Gather information about the various types of events supported by the MRC
- Establish a guideline for project timetables
- Learn about the various equipment types/configurations for events.
- Determine the functional capabilities of current billing systems
- Determine the MRC customer's expectations of service.
Crafting the Interview Questions
The text recommends that the interview team all now begin brainstorming sets of questions for the project in mind using the general guidelines of Category, Current Situation or Today, and Where We Want To Be or Tomorrow. The table below is an example of that from the text.
Category | Today | Tomorrow |
|---|---|---|
Customers (those who would buy our product) | Who are the customers? | How well are current products satisfying the needs today? |
| Who are the biggest customers? | What future trends do we see in the market? |
| Who are the most profitable customers? | How do we see the market size changing over the next three to five years? |
| Who are the most attractive potential customers? | Who is winning and losing in the market? |
| What do customers need? |
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| What products do they buy today? |
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| What is the market size (by region)? |
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Competitors (those who compete against us) | Who are the competitors? | Are there projected changes in competitors on the horizon? |
| Who are leading competitors and which ones may be having problems? |
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Technology (in manufacture or use of our product) | What technologies are used today? | What future trends do they see in technology? |
| What advantages are there for one technology over another? | Are there not-in-kind substitute products on the horizon? |
Regulatory (issues that would impact the use of our product) | What are the regulatory issues today (environmental, tax, political, federal, state, local)? | What are the regulatory issues tomorrow (environmental, tax, political, federal, state, local)? |