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| Criterion |  Agile Starfish Retrospective |  Operations Root Cause Analysis |  Operations Root Cause Tree Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|
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. | For a problem with several suspected causes, the method builds a causal structure instead of a mere list. It makes visible how causes connect and where the strongest points of leverage lie. |
Complexitydifferent | Low | Medium | Medium |
Timedifferent | 45-90 min | 1-4 h | 1-3 h |
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 | Cause Tree, Evidence Notes, Countermeasures |
Tagsno overlap | RetrospectiveImprovementExperimentsTeam | Root causeProblem solvingQualityIncident | Root causeTreeIncidentQuality |
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Methods with strong topical overlap with the current selection, not yet in the comparison.
