

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis - kungfudoi
http://startuplessonslearned.blogspot.com/2009/07/how-to-conduct-five-whys-root-cause.html

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geeko
I wonder how to conduct such why meetings without demoralizing people? I can
imagine people being more worried about being mentioned in those meetings than
they worry about customer satisfaction. Of course one could always hide the
problem beneath 'you have to build the right corporate culture'.

Also, what size does a problem need to have to result in such a meeting? Every
argument with your colleagues? Every customer related problem? Every technical
problem?

"In fact, at IMVU, we did exactly that. We started with a simple wiki page
with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over
recently."

This happens in our corporation as well, although in a much more informal way.
It goes more like this: There's an annoyance, let's solve it. As the article
says, the investments are gradual and there's not much time required to fix
the little problems. One at a time.

~~~
jmathes
"Also, what size does a problem need to have to result in such a meeting?
Every argument with your colleagues? Every customer related problem? Every
technical problem?"

Disclaimer: I work at IMVU, but I am not the article's author This is a
problem you have to solve for your own context. I suggest starting with only
the biggest problems, and seeing how the process works for you. You'll see the
people who are in those meetings getting accolades for their follow-up work,
and you'll find that as the root cause analysis gets up to why #3, the
participants are solving problems they didn't cause. Both of these will help
to build the right corporate culture, as you mention. Then, if it seems
appropriate, it will be easier to apply 5Ys to less serious problems, because
their value will be well-known to the team.

Being mentioned in a 5Y here never bothered anyone. Because you know you have
to come up with a fix for all five levels, everyone too preoccupied thinking
up solutions to begrudge anyone.

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JacobAldridge
This is a really long article, but it makes a really strong point. The more
you ask 'Why', the more you get to the root cause of a problem and not only
stop that problem from re-occuring, but prevent a lot of other negative
outcomes as well.

It also demonstrates that whiteboard meetings need not be a waste of time,
particularly if you have an analysis framework to focus your time and effort.

~~~
jmathes
I'm an engineer at IMVU, the company mentioned, since the inception of the 5Y
strategy.

I've lost count of the number of cool technologies and tweaks we've built as a
result of 5Ys. For example, occasionally one of our engineers will decide to
build his own website, and use simpletest to unit test his PHP because that's
what we have at work.

That engineer invariably complains about how bad out-of-the-box simpletest is
compared to the house model we've cooked up. I've heard "It doesn't even have
X!" many, many times. More than half the assertions in our php testing
framework are custom-made, all the web gets and posts assert on the response
code automagically, etc. And that's not even counting how much support we've
ended up building into it for our other technologies - automatic detection for
failures in memcache, SQL, and what-have-you. Or the other testing frameworks
we've rigged to run within it, like YUI test and selenium. All because of 5Ys,
and that's a minority of the good 5Ys have done for us.

~~~
billswift
They think a tool named SIMPLEtest should have all the bells-and-whistles of
EVERYTHINGbutTHEkitchenSINKtest?

~~~
eries
actually, most of these changes make the framework a lot simpler.

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321abc
It's pretty sad that people have to have something so simple spelled out for
them and given a catchy motto like "The Five Whys".

Even sadder that it would be hailed as some revolutionary problem-solving
technique.

~~~
JabavuAdams
Yes and no. There's some utility to having a dogma with a well-defined name.
If you wanted to introduce each of these practices separately, you would have
to explain each one and get people to buy into each one. Each one is a
potential point for argument and derailment. It's convenient to have a handle
that refers to the whole kit.

In practice, you'll have to introduce the techniques incrementally, but having
an over-arching name can help people see these as part of a unified plan.

~~~
TrevorJ
I can attest to how easy it is for even a small company to completely
disregard any sort of mechanism for learning from mistakes over time. It goes
against the grain of human nature to bring up problems in a useful way in a
lot of cases I think.

