The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [97]
At first, the temptation may be to make radical and deep changes to every billing system and process. Don’t. Instead, keep the meetings short and pick relatively simple changes at each of the five levels of the inquiry. Over time, as the team gets more comfortable with the process, you can expand it to include more and more types of billing complaints and then to other kinds of problems.
Appoint a Five Whys Master
To facilitate learning, I have found it helpful to appoint a Five Whys master for each area in which the method is being used. This individual is tasked with being the moderator for each Five Whys meeting, making decisions about which prevention steps to take, and assigning the follow-up work from that meeting. The master must be senior enough to have the authority to ensure that those assignments get done but should not be so senior that he or she will not be able to be present at the meetings because of conflicting responsibilities. The Five Whys master is the point person in terms of accountability; he or she is the primary change agent. People in this position can assess how well the meetings are going and whether the prevention investments that are being made are paying off.
THE FIVE WHYS IN ACTION
IGN Entertainment, a division of News Corporation, is an online video games media company with the biggest audience of video game players in the world. More than 45 million gamers frequent its portfolio of media properties. IGN was founded in the late 1990s, and News Corporation acquired it in 2005. IGN has grown to employ several hundred people, including almost a hundred engineers.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak to the product development team at IGN. They had been successful in recent years, but like all the established companies we’ve seen throughout this book, they were looking to accelerate new product development and find ways to be more innovative. They brought together their engineering, product, and design teams to talk through ways they could apply the Lean Startup model.
This change initiative had the support of IGN’s senior management, including the CEO, the head of product development, the vice president of engineering, the publisher, and the head of product. Their previous efforts at Five Whys had not gone smoothly. They had attempted to tackle a laundry list of problem areas nominated by the product team. The issues varied from discrepancies in web analytics to partner data feeds that were not working. Their first Five Whys meeting took an hour, and although they came up with some interesting takeaways, as far as the Five Whys goes, it was a disaster. None of the people who were connected to and knew the most about the issues were at the meeting, and because this was the first time they were doing the Five Whys together, they didn’t stick to the format and went off on many tangents. It wasn’t a complete waste of time, but it didn’t have any of the benefits of the adaptive style of management discussed in this chapter.
Don’t Send Your Baggage through the Five Whys Process
IGN had the experience of trying to solve all of its “baggage” issues that had been causing wasted time for many years. Because this is an overwhelming set of problems, finding fixes quickly proves overwhelming.
In their zeal to get started with the Five Whys, IGN neglected three important things:
1. To introduce Five Whys to an organization, it is necessary to hold Five Whys sessions as new problems come up. Since baggage issues are endemic, they naturally come up as part of the Five Whys analysis and you can take that opportunity to fix them incrementally. If they don’t come up organically, maybe they’re not as big as they seem.
2. Everyone who is connected