| This month the featured result involves a division in the IT Department of Retail Bank. This success story has a bit of a back story attached to it. This department has been struggling with a specific incident for about three weeks, which was about to create a big embarrassment for them in the eyes of the client and general public. |  | |
| A staff member, who was trained in the KEPNERandFOURIE™ methodologies some time ago, plucked up the courage to suggest to his boss to use a KandF facilitator from another division to help them with the incident, seeing that they were not making any progress and they were not going to meet their deadline. | ||
Long story short...the facilitator from the other division suggested appropriate information sources and conducted the session. The following is in his own words...
"CODE DEVELOPMENT ISSUE (names changed to protect relevant parties)
Just a quick note about how we used the Kepner-Fourie – Causewise solution to solve a Sev-1 issue which otherwise was certain to prevent our project from going live on the due date. Our project go-live date was also fully geared towards a once a year window of cutting over to the new U.S. Tax year so we were really under pressure to solve this issue".
Background
The DDTI Account Team made a request for a KF facilitator to run a CauseWise on very short notice. The team had been experiencing a problem in the test environment for about 2 weeks and had not been able to make progress on the resolution. The CauseWise Intuitive approach was selected and a 90 minute session was scheduled with the team. The team only included 2 people out of 8 who had previous KF experience.
The Problem Statement was:
"The MTS Adaptor is consistently failing in its long running pool connections to MTS, manifested as seg faults."
The Most Probable Cause identified
It turned out that the key piece of information was related to the question "Geographically, where is the object located". It became apparent that the problem never occurred on one developer's machine and always occurred on another developer's machine. Only one possible cause that skimmed through the testing required a couple of assumptions. These assumptions lead to a number of actions which included confirming any configuration differences, confirming the behaviour on different numbers of processor cores and confirming the usernames and passwords that were being used by different developers.
At this point the team decided to investigate the assumptions and to re-engage with the CauseWise process if further assistance was needed. The discussions in the session and further investigation uncovered the fact that different developers were using different usernames. Testing with usernames of different length highlighted that shorter account names always worked and longer account names never worked.
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| Testing and Verification After further testing the length of the usernames has been confirmed as the cause and the team are now able to progress their new release towards production. During the wrap-up, the problem owner stated "It [CauseWise] really did help to define our issue. Before the session, we were most definitely not following either the correct leads or a set methodology to solve the problem." |
2012-04-25 11:20:43"One of the biggest frustrations for Problem Management staff is re-creating the information involved in an incident. This also creates one of the largest costs to IT divisions & organisations as the difficulty in finding the correct root cause may mean the root of an incident situation is not eliminated and the incident keeps recurring.
It is time to put an end to this, because there is a very effective way to rectify it. The most important challenge is to create a consistent Model and Process, which would earn the respect and support of Incident and Problem Investigators. A model that removes the confusion and inaccuracy with terminology where some companies have hundreds of causes to work through and on the other side of the scale some companies are looking at only three root causes, one of which is “Human Error”".
2012-03-27 11:56:24
SAN DIEGO - John Case promoted everyone attending Myriad Software's 18th annual User's Conference here to president, and then went to work explaining how to use focus, accountability and teamwork to build successful companies.
Case, a former president of La-Z-Boy Residential, then CEO of Electrolux Home Products of North America, walked retailers here through the concept of what he calls F.A.T. leadership, using the aforementioned attributes to align a business for success - the perfect tie-in for a Myriad conference themed "Alliance."
2012-01-24 14:58:30 | |
Thinking Dimensions CEO and Managing Director of ITRCA Practice, Matt Fourie (See Matt's Profile) will be speaking at itSMF Conference in Singapore on March 16th 2012 : "HARDWARE, SOFTWARE UPGRADES…WHAT ABOUT A PEOPLE UPGRADE IN IT ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS?" | |
This session will concentrate on how IT Root Cause Analysis practices can impact the following bottom line metrics;
• Improved security
• Reduced operating costs without cutting overheads
• Improved service availability in all critical systems
2011-08-09 20:16:55
Thinking Dimensions won the itSMF Australia "Innovation of the Year" award. Thinking Dimensions received this award at an itSMF Australia Gala in Perth in August 2011. They won the award for their innovative approach taken with incident investigations.
2011-08-09 19:33:45In September 2011 Thinking Dimensions received accreditation for their unique Incident and Problem Management workshops and consulting services.
2012-05-19 20:13:00SAY the phrase process improvement and watch the eyes of a CEO roll back in their head. They recoil from conversations about the touted virtues of process improvement methods like Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing or Business Process Re-engineering as they are inclined, and rightfully so, to talk abou...
2012-05-18 19:35:01Companies can have different definitions or views of profitability. Nevertheless, it is one of the most important metrics that a business should take care about. Many companies measure their success on revenues and units sold, but these metrics are not always helping the management in making dec...
2012-05-18 06:05:17One area we are asked about frequently is acquisitions- yes or no? Why to acquire? The decision for an acquisition is not easy- it is one alternative to developing capabilities organically however can be costly and also difficult to integrate. So what are the steps required to approve an ac...
2012-05-09 10:29:31Managers or CEOs seeking to improve the way the company makes pricing decisions need to implement changes starting from the way the organization collects, sorts and uses data as an input in selecting the best performing alternatives. As an example, one of our clients is a leading company that desi...
2012-05-07 15:17:19At a recent client meeting you could sense the slow burn of frustration on the supply chain executives face despite an excellent pedigree to deliver high performance, extensive cross industry success - his forehead lines were visible when he asked how do you TURN the BEAST around when we ha...
