Letters…Problem Solving 101, part b

March 5, 2008 at 2:03 pm | In Six Sigma, quality, training | Leave a Comment
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Dear Bill,

Yesterday we started talking about problem solving. You may remember that I insisted that the first step in solving a problem was to correctly define the problem. In my example, it was 10:00 AM and I was hungry. I also showed that understanding the problem could go a long way to understanding root cause for that problem. In this case, using the “Five Whys” methodology, we were able to determine that the reason I was hungry was that my failure to properly set my alarm clock the night before had led me to oversleep.

It really can not be overemphasized: In order to solve a problem, you must first truly define the problem, and then drive to learn the root cause.

It really can not be overemphasized: In order to solve a problem, you must first truly define the problem, and then drive to learn the root cause.  Well, okay, maybe there can be too much of a good thing. But once you have a solid understanding of root cause, you can go about the process of corrective action.

Note the word “corrective.” That implies that the action you take will be sufficient to prevent recurrence of the problem in the future; at the least, your corrective action should address the cause of the problem and provide ways to mitigate or diminish the effect if the root cause can not be totally eradicated.

It is often the case that there can be more than one potential corrective action suggested. In our example, we determined that the root cause for my hunger problem was failure to properly reset my alarm clock after the weekend. This could lead to more than one potential corrective action:

  • I could avoid the problem by not changing my alarms for the weekend in the first place. This would, of course, mean that the alarms would wake me earlier on Saturday than I would like, but that might be preferable to oversleeping on Monday.
  • I could replace my alarm clock with one that allows different settings for different days of the week.  I actually own one such clock, which allows you to turn the alarm off or on for a particular day, so that the alarms simply are inactivated for the weekend.
  • I could try to find (or invent) a clock that allows me to have 7:00 AM for the work week, while setting 9:00 AM (or something) for the weekend.

You get the point…for every problem there are multiple solution paths. The important issue is to select a solution and then to implement the selected corrective action.

Later, friend…good luck with today’s meeting.

Letters to My Younger Self — Problem Solving 101

March 4, 2008 at 2:17 pm | In Six Sigma, quality, training | Leave a Comment
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Dear Bill,

So you think you want to be a quality manager. Are you out of your mind?  Don’t you know that quality managers get the blame when things go wrong, have to explain problems to the customer, and are the ones the boss yells at when he gets bad news? Uh huh. You wanna do it anyway. Okay, your funeral, but if you do want to be a quality manager, I have just two words for you: Problem Solving.

What, you think it’s easy to solve a problem? You may not realize it, but sometimes it’s hard just to understand what the problem really is, and not just what you think it is at first glance.  In fact, the first step in solving a problem is to accurately define the problem. 

For example, it’s 10:30 AM and I’m hungry. This is an easy problem to define: “I’m hungry.” Not hard, right?  But if I had started the problem statement with, “Man, my stomach hurts!” we would have to work backwards to determine why my stomach hurts…is it because somebody hit me? No. Because I’m sick? No. Because I did too many sit-up? Yeah, right. After the right look at the variables, we can determine that my stomach hurts because I’m hungry.

 One of the tools for determining root cause is to ask that question–”WHY?”–until you get back to the fundamental issues. For example:

  • Why am I hungry? Because I didn’t eat breakfast.
  • Why didn’t I eat breakfast? Because I got up too late and had to hurry.
  • Why did I get up too late? Because my alarm didn’t go off.
  • Why didn’t my alarm go off? Because I forgot to reset it after the weekend.

So now I have dug down to the real reason I’m hungry: I failed to reset my alarm clock lastg night! Now, you can keep digging on the problem definition to a ridiculous degree sometimes, but this answer provides me with something that can be addressed: a real problem (resetting the alarm clock), for which I can determine a cause and establish a course of action.

And that’s the important thing: Solving a problem doesn’t mean putting a band-aid on the current concern. It means fixing the problem so that it goes away for good!

In the long run, it doesn’t help my situation to get a quick bite to eat if I ignore the real problem, failing to set the alarm. Tomorrow I could find myself right back here at my desk, hungry at 10:00 AM, because I didn’t get to the root of the problem.

Tomorrow we’ll look at how to analyze root cause, once you have properly defined the problem.

A Giant of a Man

March 3, 2008 at 4:03 pm | In Six Sigma, quality | Leave a Comment
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I read yesterday that Dr. Joseph Juran, sometimes called the “Father of Quality,” passed away last week at the age of 103. While I never had the opportunity to meet Dr. Juran, I knew many quality professionals who had known him, and I learned much of what I know from his Quality Contol Handbook, which for many years has been the backbone of the quality management structure.I am grateful for Dr. Juran’s life and work.

One Step at a Time

March 3, 2008 at 3:52 pm | In Six Sigma, quality, training | Leave a Comment
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The cafeteria in my building is on the second floor (uh, first floor in Europe). That floor is 24 steps above the ground floor, where my office is.  In one stairwell, that 24 steps is divided into two flights of 12; in the other stairwell, there are three courses of steps, with flights of 7, 8, and 9 steps each, in reverse order from bottom to top. The effect of this is that it truly feels like it’s a harder climb up the two flights than it feels going up the three sets of steps.

Life can be like that, sometimes, especially when you’re trying to make progress in continuous improvement activities. We want to solve all of our problems at once, but one look at the magnitude of the issue can scare us away from even starting the effort. It’s only by breaking the activity down into small steps that can be studied and improved as pieces, that we can eventually address the problem as a whole.

There are many ways to break an issue into steps. We can use a flow chart or a tree diagram, we can use the FMEA approach I spoke of last week to determine the components of the problem that we need to address most urgently, we can use the Pareto approach to identify the most pressing concerns…all of these tools can be part of breaking a project down into manageable pieces.

Climbing a lot of steps isn’t too hard, if you just take it one step at a time.

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