|
The identification of the reason for an event increases the chance that the event can be caused or prevented in the future. The process of finding the fundamental reason why some event or defect occurred is called Root Cause Analysis.
Many tools have been created to perform root cause analysis. A few of these tools include the Pareto chart, the fishbone diagram, and failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA). Although all of these are valid and useful tools, we will take a closer look at the fishbone diagram.
The fishbone diagram has few other names such as the cause and effect diagram, 5-Whys, and the why-why diagram. These names are appropriate because this tool seeks to find the reasons why a particular event (the effect) was caused.
By working from the end after figuring out the effect is the universal algorithm for coming up with a hypothesis. Usually, this is the incident or problem someone is trying to identify. Determining cause and effect is after that. If you ask yourself "What is causing this?", you can come up with many different responses and you should compose those in catalog form. Upon the determination of the answer, you ask yourself again.
For every cause, the "why" question is asked till no more answers could be generated or till five generations have been completed (hence the 5 -Whys. Due to it,the general shape of this diagram looks similar to a horizontal tree. At the far right the original event(the effect) is listed. Then a horizontal line is drawn towards the left. From the horizontal line,the answers the "why" questions are listed. Then the reasons for those answers are branched off. In most of the cases,the branches are a little bit slanted creating a look of a fishbone.
An illustration of a 5-why chain for a business which has recently lost a client is coming after this. The business lost its client because the price was too expensive. The price was too expensive because the assembly procedure took more time than it was supposed to. The assembly took too much time because the employees didn't have the right tools. They didn't have the right tools because they weren't purchased. The tools weren't purchased because the higher management wanted to spend less money for this quarter.
After identifying the underlying cause, it is possible to undertake the necessary steps to guarantee that you can steer clear of the underlying cause in the future in the case of an adverse outcome, or ensure that it is repeated if the outcome was beneficial. When a dilemma's underlying cause is not pinpointed, solely the symptoms rather than the cause are able to be addressed. This results in unnecessary expenses, compromised quality, delays in transmission, or any or all of these.
Steve Wilheir is a project management consultant. Learn more about finding the root cause of your organization's teamwork issues, and learn more about fishbone diagrams and his Project Manager Training
|
tweet this!