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I read an excellent essay by Joel Spolsky today about Problem Management (except that he cleverly doesn’t mention Problem Management by name at all).

Some things I took away:

  1. Joel’s approach of talking about a real-life incident is exactly the strategy I’m using to implement Problem Management at my organisation. Nobody wants to sit through Powerpoint slides with process flow charts on them, but get them talking about a real problem and they are hooked. Thanks for the confirmation that my approach is not totally mad.

  2. He talks about root cause as the process by which you decide where to target your long-term solution. This is exactly the pragmatic approach to root cause analysis I was trying to describe in my last post.

I wasn’t aware of Sakichi Toyoda’s Five Whys maxim, but it makes some sort of sense. The first couple of questions you ask are going to be about the immediate symptoms of a problem. Beyond 5 questions and you are in danger of looking too deeply at the mysteries of the universe. You could well end up trying to implement too general a solution, at great expense, which fixes problems you don’t actually have.

So my amended principle is this: a root cause is that which we can alter to effect a permanent fix to a problem such that the solution addresses more than just the immediate symptoms of the problem.

The important points again are that the solution domain is limited to the space we can directly affect ourselves and that the solution should be a permanent or long-term fix, not a palliative for the symptoms.