On improvement story by 5 whys

Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to establish a procedure to examine an organization's improvement process and its adverse factors.

Design/methodology/approach

The objectives were to find a way to represent content of a specific improvement process and analyse reliability of improvement processes conducted at operational, tactical and strategic levels. Inspirations of the text were various heuristic schemes used in a process of problem solving: to stimulate transfer of data by formulation of questions (5W or 5Why); to control the flow of the process (QC Story or 8D etc.); and to document results of operation (Ishikawa, fault‐tree diagram, and others). The outcomes are: a questioning scheme on Improvement Story by 5 Whys, which provides guidance, through a study of an organization's improvement processes related to containment, corrective and preventive type; and diagrams of the Prevention State Transitions and the Improvement Snail, which facilitate navigation through the above processes.

Findings

There is a finite sequence of Why‐questions, which can be used to analyse basic characteristics of systems of improvement processes in organizations. This scheme has a direct graphical representation in the Improvement Snail and the Prevention States Transition diagrams.

Practical implications

The scheme has a wide scope of applications: it can be used retrospectively or in parallel to a running process of problem solving. A context of the analysis may be auditing an improvement process or monitoring a particular improvement project.

Originality/value

The scheme combines various aspects of improving the effectiveness of an organization's functions. It can represent, in a systematic way, information concerning risk issues related to: the problems and their mechanisms; the effectiveness of improvement processes that are related to various levels of organization: operational, tactical and strategic and their coordination. The scheme is flexible, as it can be combined with various analytical techniques such as fault tree diagram etc. and it can be adjusted to any specific purpose, by modifying the structure and content of questions set.

Citation

Myszewski, J.M. (2013), "On improvement story by 5 whys", The TQM Journal, Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 371-383. https://doi.org/10.1108/17542731311314863