The Ups and Downs of UPS

Nope, not the courier.

Its the Unified Problem Solving tool-- the IN thing when it comes to solving chronic process instability issues. From the sound of it, seems that UPS is your modern day hero that will put an end to issues that has been haunting you since time immemorial.

For our group's UPS workshop week, we dared to brave one of our so-called 'since time immemorial' problems. We were quite doubtful if we can solve it in 2.5 days given that we have been working on it for about 3 years now with various degree of success.

So, what did we learn?

1. What is essential may be invisible to the eyes.
Had to agree with Antoine de Exupery on this one. UPS and its twin, SWP, train the eyes to see the issue and not guess the root cause. Cool. But what if the issue you are working on is not accessible for scrutiny? Well, you still need to observe the phenomenon but you have to be open minded to catch meaningful connections between what you see, see where it leads you to further observe and condense what the invisible connections mean. Thus, UPS does not just train the eyes to really see. It is also mental exercise, after all.

2. Looking at a different vantage point.
Funny how for most of the teams, the issue seemed to have disappeared altogether come observation time! Our team was on floor for at least 3 hours and we were bracing ourselves for a breathless morning. But zilch! Nada. Zero. We left the video cam, all strapped and secured at the chosen vantage point so we can move around to the other lines and observe. The battery ran for two hours. As soon as the battery died, the culprit appeared and we were having our lunch break then! This recurred for the rest of the day until we decided to change our tactic (from lesson 1 above). We still worked on the same issue but decided to investigate from a different perspective. I'll spare you the sordid details. But needless to say, we made progress from there.

We often label our problems X or Y and we try and search somewhere where we think we can find X or Y. But sometimes, you just need to look for an entirely different point that's all!

3. Real problems, real solutions.
The best part about UPS is that it eliminates our obsession for theories and hypothesis. Unlike the old Cause and Effect where we include "what ifs", UPS requires that you only work into the Cause and Effect chart those phenomenon you have observed and that there is logical and observable explanation. That way, we can save our effort by working only on real problems. Of course, we had to remind ourselves from time to time to ditch the cow (bawal ang baka)!

So did we solve the problem? We found that there are three phenomena in our issue. We found the two and have solutions for those. The third phenomenon is still somewhere in the Twilight zone.