5 Whys

Scrum Teams: Slow Down, to Go Fast Later

Being two months away from my passion – agile coaching, I was exploring my other interests like un-schooling my kid, learning by traveling, and spent time experiencing natural birth. I was wondering if I should share this experience on this blog which is focussed only on Agile. But being agile is about doing different experiments and never stopping, hence I thought its worthwhile to mention it here.

It was great spiritual learning for me to prepare and experience natural(spiritual) birthing. It really taught us how different is our body than we actually perceive. To trust our own body instincts to take its own course of action rather than relying on systems(hospitals) which was built to address emergency scenarios and not normal or natural phenomenon like birthing.

This decision to slow down or cutting myself completely helped me to understands different facets of me. Slowing down helped me reassess my priorities and how I need to take my life forward. My schooling system has taught me how to make a living, NOT a life! Pity.

I was recently connecting with few teams and I saw teams “racing to the goal post” with NO goals scored often. Seeing such teams I feel we are used to speed in every aspect of life. Not sparing a thought to slow down to see how are we doing? And, even if we do that, we’re unable to bring any noticeable changes.

5 WHYs: Positive Root Cause Analysis To Find Good Practices

by Avienaash Shiralige 3 Comments

In my earlier article I shared my opinion about using 5 WHYs to find root causes. What I really missed to point was, it is not just applied to find root cause to problems, but it can be used to find root cause to good things that are happening on the team.

In sprint retrospectives we usually pick some problem that occurred, try to figure out why it happened, and then understand how we could prevent this problem from happening again in the future. Our root cause analysis meetings are usually always on “What is That Not Going Well”.

Now let’s apply 5 WHYs thinking to this question…

5 Whys: Sprint Failed – Team Did Not Deliver Committed Work

by Avienaash Shiralige 9 Comments

Applying 5 Whys is a good way to address the problems that you are facing on your teams. This thinking is very simple, just ask WHY multiple times till you reach to root cause. You can read more about 5 Whys here.

Some benefits of using this Lean technique are:

Helps identify root cause of a problem
Determine the relationship between different root causes of a problem
Very simple to use without any statistical analysis
Very useful when problems involve human factors or interactions

Asking 5 times WHY generally leads you to a root cause. In some cases you may reach in fewer iterations and in some it may take more than 5.

Now let’s apply this technique to our problem on hand.

Problem: Team failed in their sprint as they were not able to complete all the work committed.