Five Whys Lessons LearnedIntroducing five whys in established business
Tony Ford | @tony4d | March 1, 2011
Origin
• The five whys is a lean startup technique introduced to entrepreneurs and software developers by Eric Ries
• Like most of the lean startup principles it’s roots are in the Toyota Production System - preserve value with less work by eliminating waste
IGN wants to learn how to become more lean
• We invited Eric Ries to speak at IGN in early December 2010
• One obvious and cheap thing to implement right away was five whys
• Tony Ford was selected as the first (humble) five whys master
• In the spirit of lean we have conducted many five whys sessions and learned a lot
What is the five whys technique?
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=2296
What is most important?
• Five whys encourages us to spend a portion of our time addressing problems in ways that maximize the value output and avoid waste.
• The sweet spot between being too busy to do anything and insisting we must spend a lot of time correcting.
• We are most successful when we find human process problems we can correct. These are the real root causes.
• This isn’t about blame, it’s about learning together.
We started off pretty rough
• Shove everything through the five whys!• Early examples: Huge list of previous
issues, NIB, babes legal issues• We learned
Early lessons
• Don’t shove your baggage into the process. Send new problems into the process as they come up
• The session should always be kicked off with two things• Ask if there are five whys n00bs at the
session. If so, take 5 minutes to explain it• Clearly state the problem we’re trying to
solve• Use the wiki to document each session.
Sticky notes and emails are waste.
Our first feeling of success
• Native iOS project slip five why session was the first time I knew we had to keep doing this.
• We identified real human problems and came up with good proportional investments.
• This is about learning and doing.
More bumps in the road, more learning
• We kept learning, but we forgot about doing.
• The five whys master has two major functions• Coordinate, run, and document the
sessions• Follow up on proportional investments
• The sessions optimize learning what we should invest in improving. The sessions are waste if we don’t actually spend time improving anything afterwards.
Later lessons
• The wiki is great for documentation but not great for getting things done. Use pivotal tracker for proportional investments.
• https://www.pivotaltracker.com• The five whys master should be
responsible for follow up on the proportional investments that come out of their sessions.
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Recent success
• The five whys on our recent blogs outage is a great example.
• We shared it with our audience on our blog: http://www.ign.com/blogs/ign-tech/2011/02/17/blogs-outage-and-five-whys/
wisdom++
• We need to scale the process with more masters. I have not had time to do all sessions.
• Schedule 30 minutes for a session, you’ll need it.
• The sessions should be held immediately following the problem symptom. The longer you wait the less value the session has (and you’ll waste more time).
wisdom++
• Five is a guide. It is there to help us with a minimum. Avoid too many.
• Avoid unnecessary branches by keeping answers as close to the questions as possible. The goal isn’t to list problems, it’s about quickly identifying a root cause.
• Invest proportionally for the cause. “Don’t do too much and don’t do nothing.”
wisdom++
• The five whys master has ownership and authority for the sessions and proportional investments.
• We tried sessions on a lot of different types of problems and got tripped up. Stick with website outages until you’re comfortable with the process.
• Processes fail, not people.
Excellent Lean Startup & Five Whys Resources
• Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/tony4d
• Follow Eric Ries on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ericries
• Five whys blog posts from Eric Ries: http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/search/label/five%20whys%20root%20cause%20analysis