VELOCITY - DEE JACOB [106]
A few minutes later, the table was littered with little squares of paper – several dozen of them, each bearing a simple sentence.
“Let’s put them on the whiteboard,” said Amy, “so we can all have a look.”
They did this, sticking the notes to the surface in no particular order, and the result was a sprawl of comments that resembled utter chaos …
“Okay, so here we have the opinions of what each of us thinks is the real problem – or problems,” said Amy. “Now … any thoughts on what to do?”
“Excuse me,” said Wayne, “but it might help if you tell us where you want to go with this.”
“Actually, I don’t have a one-two-three process in mind,” she said. “I just thought it might help if we laid out all the basic issues and looked at them as a whole.”
“Are you saying we have to solve each one of these individually?” asked Garth.
“Individually?” asked Murphy. “I don’t believe we can do that.”
“Why not?” asked Kurt. “We just have to prioritize them and go at them one by one.”
“What I meant,” said Murphy, “is that we can’t solve one without considering the effect and influence of the others. Because, in many cases, they are interrelated.”
“Wait,” said Wayne as he stared at the collection of notes on the board. “Is there a cause-and-effect relationship between all of these?”
Amy, too, peered at the board, and said, “Yes, I can see that there certainly could be.”
She rearranged a few of the notes so that there was a sequence from one to the next.
“For instance,” she said, “If ‘workstations at Oakton … do not always finish their work during takt time,’ then it stands to reason that ‘Work flow at Oakton is being randomly delayed at various places in the plant … ’”
“Sure,” said Wayne. “It’s logical. But I’m still not sure where we’re going with this.”
“If you solve one – the root cause problem – then you solve the next problem in the sequence,” said Amy.
“Or if one solution doesn’t completely solve the next problem,” said Sarah, catching on, “then perhaps at least you’ve influenced it positively so you can build on the improvement.”
“But how do you know which comes first?” asked Kurt. “It seems like a chicken-or-the-egg kind of thing. Did the inability to finish within the takt cycle cause the delay? Or did some random delay upstream cause the takt cycle to be exceeded?”
“Seems to me,” said Murphy, “you’ve got to find out which rooster has been a-messin’ around with the hen. ’Cause lady chickens don’t just lay eggs on their own.”
Everyone else turned to him somewhat agape.
“Well, I am just an old country boy at heart!” Murphy said.
“I think what Mr. Maguire is trying to say is that we have to determine the relationships between all of the elements,” said Amy, “in order to see which was the cause and which was the effect.”
“The affairs of roosters and hens aside,” said Wayne, “this could be where DMAIC would very useful, even essential – the process of define, measure, analyze and so on.”
“Yes, very possibly,” said Amy, “but I remind you, we don’t have – I certainly don’t have – months or years to invest in some quest for the perfect process. We need to be right, but we also need to be quick. So I’m thinking, why not invest the hour or whatever in exploring this cause-effect sequence and see if there is anything to it?”
Which was what they did. They began moving the sticky notes around on the whiteboard, and when they thought they had a correct sequence, they used the colored markers to draw lines between them to indicate the relationship.
There was haggling. Everyone – including Sarah Schwick, for some time – discounted Murphy’s assessment of the impact of the Rockville analysts on the entire system of processes.
“How could a relative handful of professional employees choke the