Fishbone Diagram

Intro

A fishbone diagram (Ishikawa or cause‑and‑effect) visualizes possible causes of a problem. It matters because it structures root cause exploration across categories.

Key points:

• Organizes causes by branches (e.g., methods, machines, people, data).
• Promotes team brainstorming beyond obvious issues.
• Common use cases: defect analysis (BPM), incident reviews (Tech), customer complaints (Apps).
• Pitfall: stopping at symptoms without validating true root causes.

Examples:

• Investigating order errors across process, data, and training factors.
• Analyzing outages by environment, deployment, and monitoring gaps.
• Exploring slow response times by code, infrastructure, and workload.

In practice:

Map causes, test hypotheses with data, and link confirmed causes to corrective actions.

Related terms: root-cause-analysis; continuous-process-improvement; kpi

FAQs:

Q: When should I use a fishbone vs. a 5‑Whys?
A: Use fishbone for broad, categorized brainstorming; 5‑Whys for deep diving one cause chain.

Q: How do I validate identified causes?
A: Test with data and controlled changes.

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