Lean Sigma: A Practitioner’s Guide

30: Murphy’s Analysis

Overview

Murphy’s Analysis⁵² is another useful change management tool for the early stages of a project. It is applied during the early section of the Define Phase. The Team at this point needs to determine what the Customer Requirements are for the process, the difficulty being that the Team does not know what they don’t know. It is difficult to interview a Customer with absolutely no understanding of the problems the process faces; so before any interviews can take place, the Team has to do enough groundwork to determine what questions to ask and how to guide the interviewing. This is where a Murphy’s Analysis performs a useful function.

The Team use the Murphy’s Analysis as a brainstorming tool to identify how the process ...