The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [98]
3. At the beginning of each Five Whys session, take a few minutes to explain what the process is for and how it works for the benefit of those who are new to it. If possible, use an example of a successful Five Whys session from the past. If you’re brand new, you can use my earlier example about the manager who doesn’t believe in training. IGN learned that, whenever possible, it helps to use something that has personal meaning for the team.
After our meeting, the IGN leadership decided to give Five Whys another try. Following the advice laid out in this chapter, they appointed a Five Whys master named Tony Ford, a director of engineering. Tony was an entrepreneur who had come to IGN through an acquisition. He got his start with Internet technology, building websites about video games in the late 1990s. Eventually that led to an opportunity at a startup, TeamXbox, where he served as the lead software developer. TeamXbox was acquired by IGN Entertainment in 2003, and since that time Tony has been a technologist, leader of innovation, and proponent of agile and lean practices there.
Unfortunately, Tony started without picking a narrow problem area on which to focus. This led to early setbacks and frustration. Tony relates, “As the new master I wasn’t very good at traversing through the Five Whys effectively, and the problems we were trying to solve were not great candidates in the first place. As you can imagine, these early sessions were awkward and in the end not very useful. I was getting quite discouraged and frustrated.” This is a common problem when one tries to tackle too much at once, but it is also a consequence of the fact that these skills take time to master. Luckily, Tony persevered: “Having a Five Whys master is critical in my opinion. Five Whys is easy in theory but difficult in practice, so you need someone who knows it well to shape the sessions for those who don’t.”
The turnaround came when Tony led a Five Whys session involving a project that had been missing its deadlines. The session was fascinating and insightful and produced meaningful proportional investments. Tony explains: “The success had to do with a more experienced master and more experienced attendees. We all knew what the Five Whys was, and I did a really good job keeping us on track and away from tangents. This was a pivotal moment. Right then I knew the Five Whys was a new tool that was going to have a real impact on our overall success as a team and as a business.”
On the surface, Five Whys seems to be about technical problems and preventing mistakes, but as teams drive out these superficial wastes, they develop a new understanding of how to work together. Tony put it this way: “I daresay that I discovered that the Five Whys transcends root cause analysis by revealing information that brings your team closer through a common understanding and perspective. A lot of times a problem can pull people apart; Five Whys does the opposite.”
I asked Tony to provide an example of a recent successful Five Whys analysis from IGN. His account of it is listed in the sidebar.
Why couldn’t you add or edit posts on the blogs?
Answer: Any post request (write) to the article content api was returning a 500 error.
Proportional investment: Jim—We’ll work on the API, but let’s make our CMS more forgiving for the user. Allow users to add and edit drafts without errors for a better user experience.
Why was the content API returning 500 errors?
Answer: The bson_ext gem was incompatible with other gems it depends upon.
Proportional investment: King—Remove the gem (already done to resolve the outage).
Why was the gem incompatible?
Answer: We added a new version of the gem in addition to the existing version and the app started using it unexpectedly.
Proportional investment: Bennett—Convert our rails app to use bundler for gem management.