Udemy|Identify & Define the Problem with Business Analysis|Part 5|Root cause

 

1. Choosing a technique

There are 3 steps to choose the technique

Step 1: What is the objective? - Indentify a problemm or a pain point, oppoturnities that you can address? 

Step 2: Who has or where is that information?

Step 3: Which is the best technique? 

Example:

Case study: Bob's Towing has a total of five employees. That includes Bob, who's the owner operator, and four other tow drivers. Bob's Towing has a total of three trucks. Bob has his own tow truck that he utilizes. And then the four employees share to other tow trucks based on who's on shift at the time. Bob reached out to us and hired us as a business analyst to help him solve a problem. 

Bob's realized that he's starting to lose tow jobs. Jobs are being called in, but then when the tow truck gets out there to the customer, there's nobody there. So not only are they losing revenue on that particular tow job that they missed out on, but they're also incurring costs 'cause the driver is heading out there. We don't have any other information at this point as to why that's happening. 

Step 1: What is the objective? 

Define why losing tow jobs

Step 2: Who has or where is that information?

Bob, tow drivers, Customers  

Step 3: Which is the best technique? 

Interview - Within that interview you need to be prepared to both untilize the 5 why's techinique. Before we do that, Let's set up the interview. 

2. Interview Prepare  

2.1. Interview Notes: 

Purpose of Interview: Gain more details about and determine the potential root cause of Bob's towing losing towing jobs

Name: Bob

Title: Owner and Operation

Email: bob@gmail.com

Date; 1/30/2018

Time; 1:00 pm (30 minutes)

Location: Meeting Room A

Record? No

2.2. Interview Question:

Question 1: How do you know you are losing towing jobs? - Validate that's happening or how he know that's happening. Understand how he's measuring it, give you some clues into potential causes.
Notes:

Question 2: When did you first hear about this happening? - Help identify maybe what changed or what could have caused this.
Notes:

Question 3: Why are you losing jobs? (Five Why?) - try to drill into some of those details and help to formulate the potential root cause 
Notes:

Question 4: What steps have you taken to try and resolve the issue? - Don't follow on the same path he has of resolving the issue if he's already done some things 

Notes:

Quetions 5: Who else should I talk to about this?  Who would have knowledge of the issue?
Notes:

Question 6: Is there anything else that I should have asked, or any other details you can provide? 
Notes:

2.3. Create calendar appointment

You should create 3 calendar; 1 for send email guest. 2 for prepare interview (fix time before 15m) and folow up (plus 15m when interview ended)

3. Conduct Interview 

- Go to meeting room A, 15 minutes prior to the interview to review the purpose of the interview.

- Start the interview: You greet Bob, gained a little rapport with him with thanking him for coming in, telling them a little bit what we're going to be doing 

- Talking about the question: 

Question 1: How do you know you are losing towing jobs? - Validate that's happening or how he know that's happening. Understand how he's measuring it, give you some clues into potential causes.
Notes:  Revenue dipped in September 2017. Looked at data and realized the number of completed towing jobs had decreased, but the volume of dispatch was relatively same as normal. 

Question 2: When did you first hear about this happening? - Help identify maybe what changed or what could have caused this.
Notes: In september 2017, Agust 2017 

Question 3: Why are  you losing jobs? (Five Why?) - try to drill into some of those details and help to formulate the potential root cause 
Notes:  Unsure, Drivers are stating more customers are fone when they arrive. Don;t know why they are gone.

Question 4: What steps have you taken to try and resolve the issue? - Don't follow on the same path he has of resolving the issue if he's already done some things 

Notes: Talked to driver - normal acceptance rate. Talked to dispatch - only sending one company out. 

Quetions 5: Who else should I talk to about this?  Who would have knowledge of the issue?
Notes: Driver 

Question 6: Is there anything else that I should have asked, or any other details you can provide? 
Notes: Revenue is down nearly 20% from last year. Need to get this resolved 

4.  After - Conduct interview => Create Fishbone 

You've not ready to create a project proposal, because we don't know how we can solve this issue. Next step, we want to knod of extrapolate on this Fishbone diagram. And start to brainstorm and do some analysis 

5. Researching from fishbone diagram

We called some of our competitors and we called the other three companies. We'll call them company A, B and C, the other three preferred customers that are dispatched out based on the county hotline that's created. And all three of them have said their numbers have been pretty normal. That they haven't really seen a big uptick or a downtick in the number of jobs that are being completed.

And so this problem seems to be specific to us.

Do with prank or false dispatches, and I think we need to validate one more thing. we need to talk with the dispatch team and find out if they always go round robin. Do they always go one after another or can a customer request a particular towing company when they call the hotline? And if they request a towing company, that means that they could say, they could still be making a false or a prank dispatch, 'cause they could be requesting Bob's Towing and having us be sent out there when there's really no thing and that could be due to an upset customer or somebody trying to sabotage our business. So our next move is to contact dispatch. 

I'm gonna go ahead and send them an email and see what they respond with. Okay, I got a response back from dispatch and they said, no, the customer cannot request a tow company. If the tow company is requested, they give them-- They direct a phone number for the tow company. They only assign and dispatch round robin, so they go one after another. There is no preferential treatment and the number of customers that request a specific tow company that they give the phone number out for is negligible. It happens maybe once or twice a week. So it's a very small amount. And so we've determined that this is not going to be the cause.

 As we look at the rest of the ones that we've brainstormed, taking too long to get there and then a competitor stealing customers are the two other potential issues. So rather than going to the competitors stealing customers, that's gonna be a tough thing to look in to improve, let's kinda transition internal and find out if they're taking too long to get there.If there's some type of internal issue that's causing this to happen. And to do this, let's choose our next technique and determine how we can-- Who we could should talk to and what we should be trying to learn. About this cours Use business analysis techniques to identify a business pain point, find its root.

7. Choosing the next technique 

Step 1: What is the objective? 

Define: Are drivers taking too long to get there?

Step 2: Who has or where is that information?

Bob, tow drivers, Customers   : Because no have data customer (just store data first name + location)

Step 3: Which is the best technique? 

Observation (Because tow drivers maybe not get the right data)

8. Observation Prepare 

8.1. Observation Notes:

Purpose of Interview: Determine how much time is elapsing from dispatch to tow arrival 

Name:  Teb Baelow / Frank 

Title: Tow truck driver  

Email: Teb@gmail.com / Frank 

Date;  02/02/2018 / 02/03/2018 

Time; 4:00 pm (6 hours) / 4:00 pm (6 hours)

Observation Type: Active

Location: Tow truck

The firststep of secondary planning is to ask Teb's boss, if it's okay if we do this.

Next steps if to send out an appoitment to Teb.

8.2. Create calendar appointment

 (same interview)

9. Result after conduct observation 

So we got done with our observations.And here are the results.

We went and met with Ted on Friday, February 2 in the evening, we sat with him a total of six hours. And we got a total of 10 dispatches, well, nine of those were completed without incident. One when we arrived, they weren't around.So that means it was a 10% breakage or a 10% of the dispatches that we were sent to, that didn't actually result in a tow.

As we were observing, we completed this chart.So we are tracking the starting location,the minutes to leave, how many minutes it took to arrive, that then gives us the total minutes elapsed, and whether that dispatcher, the tow was completed. Here you can see the 10 and you can see the one that was not complete. 

The interesting thing that I saw, from a minute to leave standpoint, you know, we were quick and Ted was quick of, you've the dispatch, got his stuff together and we left. So it was within a couple minutes. And with talking to Bob he'd said that anything within five minutes is perfect. I mean, that's purely acceptable. There was only one time that we went over the five minute mark.

And that was when we were in the middle of a tow, we were actually just finishing up a tow, we were just about to arrive and we had to unhook the vehicle to then be able to leave to be dispatched to that second tow. So that was the only one where it took us a little bit more than five minutes, but there's not really much we can do there. When we focus on the one that didn't get completed, it was the longest one, the total minutes elapsed was the highest. And the biggest thing is it took us 26 minutes to arrive. It was far away, it was way out in the boonies. And it seemed a little odd that we were driving all the way out that way. But it, we were able to go through and we got there and they weren't there we tootled around. We didn't have a phone number to contact them at which usually Ted was saying that you don't dispatcher such and providing to have a phone number to reach out to the customer. 

And that was it, we went back to the office then. So it was a waste of 30 minutes of work plus the gas to get out there and back, which is a pretty decent in a tow truck of that size. So that was Ted. Off the one couldn't make any really sound judgments. But we did have the observation the next day. 

And the observation the next day was with Frank. With Frank, we sat with him, again it was actually been about 5 1/2 hours, it was a really slow night. On the Saturday night is a beautiful night and obviously there wasn't a lot of cars breaking down for some reason, but we got a total of six dispatches. So we were sent up to six tows, four of them were completed, two of them weren't. There was no customer there when we arrived. So that was a 33% breakage on the dispatches to complete ratio. 

That definitely made the night pretty long. Not only was it slow, but we were driving out to places where the customer ended up not being. And it was actually our first dispatch and our third dispatch of the night that we didn't have anybody there that we could tow. Again, these were ones where we drove over 20 minutes to get there. We were going out towards where Ted and I had went the day before. and it just, it seemed way out there and seemed really far away. And Frank even made mentioned that the territory seems to have increased, said he never had gone out that far into that area, because this is kind of the rural area. And he's just saying that this felt like more recently, they were doing a lot more 20 plus minute trips to get to the locations, and he wasn't sure exactly what was going on with that. But it seemed less frequent in the past. So that's definitely something we wanna look into. 

10.  Indentify Root cause

During the observations we learned a lot of clues as to what could be happening. The data was showing us that any tow jobs that were more than 20 minutes away, had a higher prepotency to not be completed. And from what Frank was saying, he was noticing that, or it seemed to be that more tow jobs were 20 plus minutes away than in previous months and in previous years, and so he wasn't sure what was causing that. 

So what we did is, the first thing we did is we mapped out the territory of Bob's Towing. And you see that on the map here. So we mapped it out. Bob's Towing is located on Eau Claire. That's that red star near the upper left hand corner. The red x's denote a place that we were dispatched to, that when we got there, there was no customer around. And this was for the month of September. So we went through and marked out all the ones that we were dispatched to, that we couldn't actually complete a tow on, and the data shows something really interesting.

Almost all of our missed tows, most all of our breakage for our dispatched tows, is coming around the city of Adams. So that is everything down in the bottom right hand corner of our territory. So it's the furthest point away from Bob's Towing office. So then once we discovered this, we looked into the data a little bit more. We looked over the data from August all the way through the end of 2017. And what we discovered, was the tows that were not being fulfilled, 96% of those was happening within a three mile radius of the city of Adams. So 96% of our breakage of tows was happening around there. Now regardless of why the customers were no longer there, if another company helped them, they were able to get it resolved themselves, no matter what happens with that.

The root problem that we've really uncovered is the time that it takes to get from the office, to the area of the city of Adams, with it being more than 20 plus minutes, we have a 96% chance of getting there and not actually having a tow. So now that we've uncovered the root of the problem, we can move forward in our potential project process.

Bonus 2 technique Five Why and Fishbone 

1. Five Whys

Don't take the intial answers as final, Dig deeper by asking a series of whys.

Example:

Request: Enhance the current system to allow for Administrators to enter in leads

What is that?

Details: It is difficult for Sales reps to enter leads into the system

Why?: Why is that?

Details: Because sales reps are not in the office.

Why?: Why is them not being in the office important?

Detail: Because Sales reps don't have access to the system outside of the office.

Why?: Why do thay not have access to the system when out of the office?

Details: Because the system uses the internet.

Why?: Why can the sales reps not access the internet?

Detail; Because their tablets do not have a mobile data plan.

Why?; Why do they not have a mobile data plan?

Detail: Because their tablets do not have a mobile data plan option. 

=> Initial Problem: Administrators cannot enter leads into the system

Root problem: Tablets give to Sales reps don;t have the option to connect to the internet via mobile data so it is invconvenient for them to enter leads into the system.

The process Five whys IIBA:

Step 1 - Write a problem on a whiteboard

Step 2 - Ask "Why do you think this peoblem occurs? and capture the results

Step 3 - Ask "Why?" again and capture the idea below

Step 4 - Repeat step 3 until you are convinced you're at the root cause 

2. Fishbone Diagram 

Template: 

Bonus case study

Choosing a Technique - Test Your Skills

You will be provided with a scenario and a few questions to follow. This activity will test your knowledge of when to choose the various techniques and why.

Activity Instructions

The best way to validate your learning is through an activity. For this assignment you will be given a scenario and then you will be asked a series of questions about it. Many of these questions will ask you about what technique or tool would fit well into the situation.

OPTIONS:
Observation -- Interview -- Survey -- Process Analysis -- Pareto Chart -- SWOT Analysis -- Market Analysis

 If you chose interview, observation, or survey, be sure you also provide the additional details pertaining to it. 

The 'details' I'm referring to are the items you can find on the top of the corresponding Elicitation Notes template. For this assignment, what is highlighted in yellow is required and the items highlighted in blue are optional.

You will want to note these down or utilize the workbook documents you downloaded at the beginning of the course as you won't be able to see these images once you get into the assignment.

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Scenario 1:

ABC Company wants you to focus on the internal help desk. They support the company by taking internal calls for things like password resets, hardware fixes/replacements, software installs, etc. While the company has only grown by 1% over the past 12 months, the call volume has skyrocketed (164% increase). They track each call, the prompts selected, the reported problem, the actual problem, and the solution implemented. They want to understand why the volume has gone up, so they can create a project to decrease it.

1.) What technique or tool is the best to start this analysis off with? What would you be hoping to learn? 

2.) After you learn those details, what are your most likely next steps and why? 

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Scenario 2:

Automotive Repair has 25 locations spread across the Midwest. Over the past few years, a competitor (123 Auto) has begun opening locations in and around Automotive Repair’s current territory. Executives at Automotive Repair fear if they don’t differentiate themselves, their sales could decrease sharply.

1.) What technique or tool can identify areas of opportunity for Automotive Repair? Why?

2.) What technique or tool could be utilized to generate (and later analyze) ideas and thoughts from over 3,000 employees spread across five different states? Why?

3.) What technique or tool could be utilized to uncover automotive repair industry best practices? Why?

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Scenario 3:

Homes-4-You, a non-profit organization, is amid their annual spending audit. These audits are done every year to validate donated money is being spent in places with the highest impact. You were asked to look through the auditing process and identify any potential areas for improvement.

1.) What is the best tool to help you lay out and visualize the audit procedure?

2.) What two techniques could be utilized to help you gain the necessary information for the selected tool? Be sure to include the technique details in your answer.

Answer: file:///C:/Users/ASUS/Downloads/0610_RESOURCE_ANSWERKEY_IdentifyAndDefineProblem_Activity1.pdf