Lessons in Problem Solving

Theoretical and practical.

This morning, I attended a one hour presentation on the benefits and practice of Total Quality Management. I figured that the fact that all the words were capitalized reflected some sort of stamp of approval or authenticity from management powers-that-be. Who knew it had been around since the 50s? That's what I get for not majoring in business. Lots and lots of bullet-point ridden slides. Lots of talk about root cause analysis, problem identification, solution deployment, results analysis, streamlining and metrics. I was awash in jargon. All the while, I was thinking "How will this work in the real world? It seems all well and good for a manufacturing type of company, but for our little outfit? We'll see."

The meeting finished and I hear from my friend T, one of our software engineers, that we've got a Big Real Life Work Problem on our hands. Aha! It's time for root cause analysis! Something is very wrong with the core of what's keeping our website up and running but we didn't have the slightest clue what is causing it. Right. Any minute now, we could have been dead in the water. With no time to do multiple solution design and testing, what happens next?

Would you still go after the root cause? Would you find a way around it? If you can't get around it from one step removed from the root cause, do you backtrack further? What do you spend time on? How do you prioritize? What's the backup plan? What's the worst case scenario and what would we do then? Would you know when to step away to gain some perspective? TQM, take that!

T had been wrestling with this beast for most of last night and most of the morning and sounded very, very pissed off. I'm not a software engineer so I couldn't contribute to the troubleshooting. But I could pull him away from his desk, away from the noxious cloud of frustration that surrounded him and get him into the fresh air. So we went for a 5 mi run. Maybe it helped to clear his mind, I don't know for sure. But when we got back, he went right back to work and about two and a half hours later, a solution was in place. It didn't address the root cause but it kept us up and running. It's a temporary solution that buys us more time to figure out the real fix.

What did I learn from all this?

• There's theory and there's practice and the two may or may not coincide.
  
• If you can't figure out the root of your problem, it's ok to have a stop-gap fix.
  
• Taking time out separate yourself from the problem at hand can help.
  
• Always have a backup plan.
  
• Running is a great stress reliever. (What? You thought this was going to be a totally serious post?)