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| Criterion | ![]() Agile Starfish Retrospective | ![]() Operations Root Cause Analysis | ![]() Operations Fishbone Diagram |
|---|---|---|---|
Purposedifferent | When improvement options need to be sorted more finely than just start and stop, it brings observations into clear kinds of action. This makes visible what should be done more, less, newly, or continued. | When a problem keeps recurring and the cause stays unclear, the method exposes the underlying mechanism. It separates symptom, guess, and robust explanation from one another. | When a problem has several possible contributing factors, the method sorts causes by cause areas. It prevents an initial hunch from blocking the view of other plausible drivers. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Low |
Timedifferent | 45-90 min | 1-4 h | 30-60 min |
Participantsdifferent | 4-12 | 3-8 | 2-8 |
Formatdifferent | Workshop | Workshop + async | Workshop |
Outputdifferent | Starfish Board, Practice Changes, Experiments | Problem Statement, Cause Hypotheses, Confirmed Causes, Action Plan | Fishbone Diagram, Cause Categories, Investigation Backlog |
Tagsno overlap | RetrospectiveImprovementExperimentsTeam | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident | Root causeQualityOperations |
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Methods with strong topical overlap with the current selection, not yet in the comparison.






