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