Real Life Cases

Our life consists of problems, which we need to sort out to go forward, while some of them are easy, the others might be quite challenging. Let’s take an example from real life first. If you complain that it takes half an hour to take your child to school, is the problem really the distance or the fact that your job offers no flexibility ?

If the problem is the distance, changing schools or moving houses might seem like viable options. But, if the issue is a lack of work flexibility, practical solutions like hiring a shuttle service or adjusting work hours could be more appropriate. When defining the problem, the solutions follow accordingly.

All paths are quite different depending on problem, aren’t they ? Just like in life, misdefining problems in a professional context can lead to wasted time, effort, and resources. Let’s look at an example from the industry.

How Misdefining a Quality Problem Affects Your Business

Your customer informs you of a quality issue, claiming that your product cannot be assembled with their parts. So, when you address the problem to the product that you sent to the customer, all efforts, cost and works will be on that. You will maybe measure all them, and check all past data with some data analysis, you’ll try to develop some immediate actions to temporary fix the problem although the problem is unclear. Let’s imagine, you do all those works and identify an out of tolerance point on the part. But what if the problem still continues after fix this out of tolerance on your product ? It is because, maybe the problem is not about your product, but the customer’s process ? Perhaps the issue lies in customer’s part variation rather than yours. Wouldn’t it be frustrating to realize you’ve wasted a lot of effort, cost, and time on a irrelevant aspect that does not resolved the problem ?

We should justify the problem by identifying correctly. In the case at above, when we address a part without the right verifications, we might spend a significant effort without an useful outcome. But if we could check both our and customer’s product at first in order to understand the variation’s origin, we could address it to the correct point, which is the customer process for that case.

Effective Problem Definition

Without a clear problem definition, every step you take is just a shot in the dark. Start with clarity, and solutions will naturally follow. In the other word, the right direction can only be done by starting with a correct and sufficient problem definition. In this point, we should get support from proven problem statement techniques for a comprehensive problem definition such as 5W2H.

(The 5W2H technique is a problem definition tool that helps break down a issue by asking seven questions: What, When, Where, Who, Why, How, and How Much.)

Have you ever experienced a situation where mis-defining the problem led to wrong solutions? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!