Business and Management Consulting: Delivering an Effective Project

Sixth Edition

Louise Wickham

Jeremy Wilcock

Case Study: Robinson Manson

Capture the current state of the situation

Once you align around the problem or need you'd like to address, then it's time to capture and analyze the current state of the situation. Toyota suggests that problem solvers:

• Observe the work processes firsthand and document your observations.
• Gather around a whiteboard and walk through each step in your process. You can use fancy process charting tools to do this, but stick figures and arrows will do the job just as well.
• If possible, quantify the size of the problem (e.g., % of tickets with long cycle times, # of customer deliveries that are late, # of errors reported per quarter). Graph your data if possible; visualizations are really helpful.

Conduct a root cause analysis

Now that you see your process, try to figure out the root cause of the efficiencies. You can ask questions like:

• Where do we suffer from communication breakdowns?
• Where do we see long delays without activity?
• What information are we needing to collaborate more effectively/smoothly?

Document these pain points, then dig deeper. The 5 whys is a helpful tool forconducting a thorough root cause analysis. The basic idea is that you begin with a problem statement, and then you ask "Why?" until you discover the real reason for the problem. You may or may not have to ask why exactly five times - this is simply an estimate.

https://www.planview.com/resources/articles/a3-process-problem-solving/

https://www.raona.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/LeanA3Guide.pdf