Five Whys
Example
(1) Why is the average lead time so long? Because it’s taking over six months for most users’ feature requests to make it into the software.
(2) Why is it taking over six months for users’ requests to make it into the software? Because those feature requests are almost always pushed back to make room on the schedule for last-minute changes.
(3) Why are there so many last-minute changes? Because before the team can release software to the users, they need to do a review with senior managers, and those senior managers almost always ask for basic, foundational changes.
(4) Why do the senior managers almost always ask for basic, foundational changes? Because they all have very specific opinions about how the software should look, how it needs to function, and sometimes even the technical tools that should be used to build it, but the team doesn’t hear those opinions until after they’ve built all of the code and have demoed it to the senior managers.
(5) Why doesn’t the team hear those opinions until after they’ve built all of the code and given a demo? Because the senior managers are too busy to talk to the team early in the project, so they’ll only attend the final demo — and send the team back to the drawing board after the software is finished.
[[Learning Agile]] (p294)
