As a project manager, you will sometimes be in a situation where you need to facilitate brainstorming sessions. These sessions may be held for a variety of reasons. For examples, you could be brainstorming solutions to a problem that has arisen with your product, brainstorming the cause of a problem, or having a creative session for new ideas. These are just a few of the possibilities. An exercise that can help these brainstorming sessions is to have the team create diagrams. One of these diagrams, which I believe is very effective, is an Ishikawa diagram, also known as a fishbone diagram. The goal of this diagram is to find the cause of a problem. You begin by drawing a problem, in a circle. From there you draw a long arrow to this bubble. Off of this arrow(or the spine of the fish) , you draw arrows off for each possible, most general categories that could be causing your problem. Then within each category you go down a level of generality and write possible causes. You may go down as many levels as you like, ideally until you find your root cause. Those these diagrams are used often to identify problems in a project, they are also very effective for product design. Reportedly, the Mazda Miata was designed using this diagram. You can find that there are usually high level causes for each industry that you can start with. For example, for the manufacturing industry they are manufacturing, material, method, man power, measurement and mother nature.
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