Having done quite a bit of politicing at a centuries old, med sized company, I can tell you that what management wants you is the assurance that this particular problem won’t happen again. Ideally there will be an actionable outcome, so someone can check that off a todo list at a later meeting Though what I’ve found is that if you have enough clout you can add an addendum to the root cause analysis, and you can start getting into things like misaligned incentives. But always keep in mind, at best you can only point out this will mean this class of problem will keep happening.
If you do this, know that there be dragons. You have to be very careful here, because for any sufficiently large company, misaligned incentives are largely defined by the org chart and it’s boudaries. You will be adding fuel to politics that is likely above your pay grade, and the fallout can be career changing. I was lucky to have a neutral reputation, as someine who cared more about the product than personal gain. So I got a lot of leeway when I said tonedeaf things. Even still I ended up in crosshairs once or twice in the 10 years I was at the company for having opinions about systemic problems.
> Having done quite a bit of politicing at a centuries old, med sized company, I can tell you that what management wants you is the assurance that this particular problem won’t happen again.
I'm not disagreeing. I'm saying they should phrase it this way (and some do), instead of masking it with an insincere request for root causing.
> Ideally there will be an actionable outcome, so someone can check that off a todo list at a later meeting
Occasionally this is the right thing to do. And often this results in a very long checklist that slows the whole development down because they don't want to do a cost-benefit analysis of whether not having an occasional escape is worth the decrease in productivity. And this is because the incentives for the manager is such that the occasional escape is not OK.
In reality, though, he will insist on an ever growing checklist without a compromise in velocity. And that's a great recipe for more escapes.
That's the problem with root cause analyses. Sometimes the occasional escape is totally OK if you actually analyze the costs. But they want us to "analyze" while turning a blind eye to certain things.
I've worked at places that understood this and didn't have this attitude. And places that didn't. Don't work for the latter.
BTW, I should add that I'm not trying to give a cynical take. When I first learned the five whys, I applied it to my own problems (work and otherwise). And I found it to be wholly unsatisfying. For one thing, there usually isn't a root cause. There are multiple causes at play, and you need a branching algorithm to explore the space.
More importantly, 5 (or 3) is an arbitrary number. If you keep at it, you'll almost always end up with "human nature" or "capitalism". Deciding when to stop the search is relatively arbitrary, and most people will pick a convenient endpoint.
Much simpler is:
1. What can we do to prevent this from happening again?
2. Should we solve this problem?
Expanding on the latter, I once worked at a place where my manager and his manager were militant about not polluting the codebase to solve problems caused by other tools. We'd sternly tell the customers that they need to go to the problematic tool's owner and fix them, and were ready to have that battle at senior levels.
This was in a factory environment, so there were real $$ associated with bugs. And our team had a reputation for quality, and this was one of the reasons we had that reputation. All too often people use software as a workaround, and over the years there accumulate too many workarounds. We were, in a sense, a weapon upper management wielded to ensure other tools maintained their quality.
If you do this, know that there be dragons. You have to be very careful here, because for any sufficiently large company, misaligned incentives are largely defined by the org chart and it’s boudaries. You will be adding fuel to politics that is likely above your pay grade, and the fallout can be career changing. I was lucky to have a neutral reputation, as someine who cared more about the product than personal gain. So I got a lot of leeway when I said tonedeaf things. Even still I ended up in crosshairs once or twice in the 10 years I was at the company for having opinions about systemic problems.