Business authors keep writing about looking into the future for opportunities and risks. It makes sense. You cannot ride a car without caring about things ahead. However, giving no attention to what behind is also not a good idea. While it is less evident, not many people write about it. In fact, the main point is what, not where, you should give attention to, and there are many important things behind you.
Discussing about them all would be too long for one article, so here is just about my favorite one: root causes. You cannot always work with risks and prospects. Problems are always
around you, no matter how qualified you are. Try not only to solve problems, but also analyze and understand the reasons behind them. It may seem obvious. However, when things are messing up in your project, you may stay at work whole day or work overtime just only to discuss workarounds and implement corrective actions. When problems are over, you and your team feel relaxed. And that is when you forget to look back.
The Pareto principle can be applied here. 20% of reasons make up 80% of your problems. In project management, I would say, the ratio may be even less, 10% ÷ 90%. So, be sure to analyze what is behind your problems. There may not be so many reasons, unless you fail to identify them. Here are some of my tips
Discuss about reasons with your team
Brainstorming sessions give you many ideas that you alone may not be aware of. The more ideas here, the better. Do not limit to causes of problems, look for causes of causes, too. Then keep an issue log, with problem description and identified causes documented.
Group your causes into categories
Review your issue log with identified causes and you will notify a trend that some of them tends to appear over and over again, causing many problems. Also, you can notice this by paraphrasing reasons. These are items that you should keep great attention to. They are root causes.
Eliminate root causes, not just problems
If a problem appears more than once, it mostly will repeat in the future if you do not eliminate its root cause. You may not have enough time to do this while working around problems. However, do not stop by resolving problems, go ahead for root causes.
