Section 30. Murphy s Analysis

30. Murphy's Analysis

Overview

Murphy's Analysis^[52] is another useful change management tool for the early stages of a project. It is applied during the early section of the Define Phase. The Team at this point needs to determine what the Customer Requirements are for the process, the difficulty being that the Team does not know what they don't know. It is difficult to interview a Customer with absolutely no understanding of the problems the process faces; so before any interviews can take place, the Team has to do enough groundwork to determine what questions to ask and how to guide the interviewing. This is where a Murphy's Analysis performs a useful function.

^[52] Murphy's Analysis was first proposed by Dewan Simon, an SBTI Consultant, during SBTI's revamp of the Transactional Six Sigma process in 2001.

The Team use the Murphy's Analysis as a brainstorming tool to identify how the process can fail to function perfectly, as in Figure 7.30.1.

Figure 7.30.1. An example of a Murphy's Analysis for an invoicing process.

Based on the results of the Murphy's Analysis, the Team has a reasonable view of possible areas to investigate during the interviewing process.

Note that the Murphy's Analysis result is not considered in any way to be the VOC; it is only one of a series of tools used to identify the VOC.

A second useful function of Murphy's Analysis is that during the early stages of a project there is still venting that needs to be done by Team members. What better tool than one that focuses on the negatives in the process.

Logistics

Creating a Murphy's Analysis is absolutely a Team activity and should not be done by the Belt in isolation. Also, the Belt should not be tempted to create a straw man of the Murphy's Analysis; rather, it should be created from scratch with the whole Team present.

It generally takes the Team 4560 minutes to generate a reasonably useful result. The Team needs flipchart paper, wall space, sticky notes, and pens.

Roadmap

The roadmap to creating the Murphy's Analysis is as follows:

Step 1.	Start with the purpose of the process. This should have been determined during construction of the SIPOC. The purpose is typical to generate something, to bring value in some form, and is often a composite sentence for example: The Customer quickly receives an accurate invoice. Accurate lab results are available quickly. If a purpose is not already identified, then falling back on timeliness and accuracy of the resulting product typically helps. Place the purpose at the center of a flipchart-sized sheet of paper on a colored sticky note.
Step 2.	Brainstorm how the process fails to deliver the purpose and how it might fail in the future to deliver the purpose. Write each failure mode individually on its own sticky note (use a different colored note for the purpose to keep it separate).
Step 3.	For each Failure Mode, look one step back up the causal chain to identify why that failure mode occurs. For example, at the bottom of Figure 7.30.1, one potential Failure Mode is that the "Invoice Quantity Varies from PO." This is caused potentially by a number of things, including "Typing Error By Shipper."
Step 4 (optional).	After the body of the Murphy's Analysis is complete as per Figure 7.30.1, capture it electronically. Then the sticky notes could be removed onto a separate sheet and affinitized into groups. This could be by subject area, but often is better stratifying the notes into High and Low Impact and High and Low Likelihood as per Figure 7.30.2. Figure 7.30.2. A Murphy's Analysis output stratified by Impact and Likelihood.

Interpreting the Output

Although Murphy's Analysis is a great tool prior to Failure Modes and Effects Analysis, its primary purpose as per the "Overview" section is to structure the Customer Interviewing process.

The high impact and high likelihood failure modes should be key inputs to the questions used during the interviewing process, see "Customer Interviewing" in this chapter.