1

Identify Symptoms, Workarounds, and Root Cause

• Identify the symptoms of the issue and suggest a work around.
• Think about the systemic root cause of the issue.
• Consider a suitable process improvement suggestion to eliminate the root cause.
• It is always better to eliminate problems at their root cause. However, this is not always possible because of the impact the process change may have or the cost of implementing the process change. At certain stages in projects and iterations, root cause fixes are inappropriate and short term symptomatic workarounds are preferable. If a workaround is preferred, then log the root cause and the improvement suggestion for future consideration at operations review.

2

Create Action Plan

• Create a plan of actionable task work items to address the symptoms or root cause depending on information in the analysis from the previous step.

3

Assign Tasks

• Assign tasks to appropriate team members.

Suggested process change to eliminate the root cause of an issue.

Suggested corrective action plan as a list of actionable task work items to overcome the flow blocking issue.

An analysis of the symptoms, root cause, suggested workarounds, and root cause elimination process improvement suggestions for the issue.