Project teams should build smart, aggressive plans that enable them to make commitments to their management and, ultimately, their customers. A smart plan is well thought out to provide the quickest, high-value option possible. Being quick should always be paired with commitments the team can keep and even beat.

We have found again and again that teams build plans and deliver results based on the questions that leaders ask. For example, one vice president repeatedly asked software developers to "hurry up and get the software to testers so they could start finding the defects." The developers, of course, obliged, and the testers found so many defects it took twice as long in development to find and fix enough of them to deliver a working product.

Building smart plans quickly with low effort requires leadership to ask the questions that drive the kind of results you want. This book of questions was created to set and reinforce expectations of excellence in the teams that build your products.