Problem Solving - a key Competency

In my last post, I delved into a range of competencies crucial for managerial effectiveness in software companies. This article focuses on 'Problem Solving' – a pivotal competency employed consistently across all levels of an organization.

I believe that all of us have a mental model/template of solving a problem.

My template of solving any problem typically consists of 3 steps:-

• Understanding the problem
• Creating the solution
• Monitoring the impact of the solution

Let me elaborate on each one of these.

Step 1: Understanding the Problem

The objective of this step is to ascertain a range of factors that contribute to the genesis of the problem.

In order to determine the factors, it is extremely important to get a thorough understanding of the problem and its context.

The following set of questions are a useful guide in creating the understanding:

Q1) Can we represent the problem in some quantifiable metrics?

Representing the problem in a quantifiable metrics ensures that all stakeholders have the same view of the problem with respect to urgency, prioritisation etc and the stakeholders collaborate easily working together on a solution.

Q2) How has the problem grown to its current state?

It is important to understand the evolution of the problem and the journey it took to reach its current state. This means:

• Understanding the changes in process, changes in team structure, changes in manger, changes in policy or culture etc., that happened in the past, and correlation of these changes with problem growth.
• Understanding whether any attempt was made to solve the problem in the past?
• If Yes, why did the solution not work? What were the main reasons for the failed attempts?
• What is the slope of the Problem's growth?

Q3) What is the extent of damage caused by the problem?

Are we losing X Revenue or Margin or Customers or NPS Score due to this problem?

This would help determine the urgency with which the problem needs to be addressed.

Q4) What is the root cause of the problem?

The idea here is to write down a set of reasons that are causing the problem and sorting them in order of their contribution.

Step 2: Creating the Solution

This step is pretty straightforward and, based on our answers to Q4) above, we can go about addressing the issue.

I have seen that people are very enthusiastic about solving any problem and spend far more time and effort at this stage.

But the quality of solution depends heavily on the quality of how well is the problem understood.

Hence "Step1: Understanding the Problem" deserves much more time and attention.

Typically, for most engineering and product problems, the solution candidates are:

• Helping/Guiding underperforming manager/engineer
• Fixing process issues
• Fixing unstable infrastructure
• Improving team(inter and intra) communication and collaboration
• Motivating team

Step3: Monitoring the impact of the solution

There are two aspects of this step:-

• Measuring the “problem-metrics” in a regular manner. When the solution is having desired result, the time slope of the problem-metric would be negative.
• Informing the stakeholders about the progress of the solution in regular manner.

The regular communication on “how the solution is working” to all the stakeholders strengthens the level of trust the business stakeholders have in the engineering and product team.

I am sure each one of us have our own model of solving a problem and the best model is the one that works for us.

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