Getting To The Root Cause Of A Problem

When something goes wrong in the new product development pipeline, more often than not businesses see it as a crisis and invariably end up blaming the process, procedure or the individual responsible instead of understanding the root cause of the problem. Not many realize that this is the leaning opportunity that should never be missed. It is no brainer that it is only from failures that we learn; success seldom teaches you anything that you don’t know yet.

The first priority is to get the system up and running in a crisis situation but once you are through with it, you need to do a postmortem and find out the root of the problem. To get to the root of the problem that will enable you to search for an able solution to the issue, you need to ask a few questions – 5 to be exact which will give you the answer that you are looking for. You will have to start asking ‘Why’. This can be best illustrated with an example. For instance, let’s say that your website is down; here is a set of questions and answers that will help highlight the problems faced.
1. Why is the Website down? Ans: The CPU utilization across all servers had hit 100% capacity.
2. Why was there a sudden spike in CPU usage? Ans: There was a new code that had an infinite loop running.
3. Why was the code written in the first place? Ans: Mr.X made a mistake
4. Why did the mistake get checked in? Ans: He had failed to write a unit test for the same
5. Why did he not write the unit test? Ans: He is a new employee who is still untrained

Asking the right questions will always get you to the root of the problem rather than jumping the gun and forming assumptions and shifting the blame. No matter which business you are running, in the time of crisis effectively using the right lean start-ups ideas will help you not only come out of the situation but will ensure that there isn’t a repetition of the same.

Read also Going About The Minimal Viable Product (MVP) Process