Other Lean Techniques
There are many more Lean techniques and practices that are more focused than the Lean analysis practices we just covered. These techniques can be applied in specific circumstances or for particular purposes. We’ll briefly mention a few of them here.
Root Cause Analysis (Five Whys)
The Lean response to resolving a problem is not to merely fix the surface problem, but to find the root cause of the problem and fix that. Root cause analysis techniques are used to do this. Root cause analysis is not unique to Lean, but it is a fundamental part of Lean thinking.
There are many ways to do root cause analysis, but one of the most common and easiest to remember is known as the “five whys.” This simply means asking the question “Why?” at least five times. For example:
- Why did the application crash?
Answer: Because the database schema didn’t match what the application thought it was.
- Why did the database schema not match the application’s expectation?
Answer: Because a bad hard disk required us to restore that database from a backup, and the restored database was from the previous version of the application, with an older schema.
- Why wasn’t the database restored from a version with the new schema?
Answer: We didn’t have one.
- Why didn’t we have one?
Answer: Because database backups are made nightly and the hard disk crashed after the application was deployed but before the database was backed up.
- Why didn’t we make a database backup as part of the application deployment?
Answer: That’s ...
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