The 5 Whys

Finding ways to improve the process is one of the objectives during a retrospective. Finding what should have been done, or what should not have been done, and so on. Once you figure out what these things were the next step is to figure out how to improve on them for future projects. A good technique for this is called the 5 Whys Technique. This technique can be used to found what the original problem which can sometimes be hard to get back to. This technique is also fairly simple to understand.

Quite simply, you just need to ask “Why?” 5 times. The first Why is always the easiest. As you move on with each iteration of asking “Why?” you might find that it starts getting more difficult to answer than before. The first “Why?” might give you a quick answer and be related to a problem that happened most recently. For example, if your car broke down, the first answer might be that the battery died. On the second iteration you have to answer “Why did the battery die?” As you might already see, this will get increasingly difficult to answer. By the fifth time you ask “Why?” you might have an answer such as “I didn’t properly maintain my vehicle” or something similar to that. This answer would be a root cause of the problem. The root of the problem is what you want to find as that is what you need to correct to truly prevent the issue from happening again.

This technique is a good thing to use when something just doesn’t seem to make sense. It’s also useful for the facilitator of this technique to be someone that is outside of the team. If the technique is used within the team, you might have difficulty with looking at the problems from varying view points. Since the team always works together and faces similar problems together. Someone from outside of the team will likely bring in a fresh view point. The fresh view point is definitely something that will assist in the team finding new and better answers to “Why?”

Sources:

"Agile at Work: Getting Better with Agile Retrospectives" https://www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/Agile-Work-Getting-Better-Agile-Retrospectives/175961-2.html Accessed 4 Dec. 2017

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https://www.workhappynow.com/2010/02/how-to-use-5-whys-discover-true-needs/