26. Straw Man
Team members feel comfortable offering a straw-man solution in order to elicit early feedback and insight.
A straw man is not an abstract model. It is a solution. It may be an incomplete and/or incorrect solution, but you intentionally offer it up to solicit client criticism. Your purpose goes back to the world’s oldest systems joke:
Clients don’t know what they want until they see it . . . and that’s not it.
Any really funny joke has a grain of truth in it, and this one is no exception. Clients simply do not know what they want because they have no idea what they can get. The best analysts do not try to analyze their way to a solution. ...
Get Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior now with the O’Reilly learning platform.
O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.
