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Hello and welcome to our community site!
I am Julie Basu, the Founder and CEO of smartQED. Having been involved in numerous IT incidents and problem investigations in my work, I came to realize the value of systematic, in-depth analysis of potential causes for a problem.
With text-based tools such as chats and tickets, investigating a problem can be a confusing, chaotic, and inefficient process. It is easy to miss culprits that, on hindsight, seem obvious. Problems may repeat due to lack of proper root cause analysis, and affect the reliability of our product and services.
We at smartQED believe in the power of visual collaboration, especially for the distributed and virtual teams common in this digital era. We have reimagined the traditional method of cause analysis using the Fishbone diagram, and transformed it with the combined power of real-time collaboration, integrated fault analysis, and self-learning.
We are now creating a community library of free QED templates to gather our collective problem-solving knowledge and help all of us resolve problems faster and easier. Our vision is to build up the world’s largest repository of problem-solving know-how expressed visually in the form of Fishbone templates that are structured and easy to understand, reuse, customize, and combine. Anyone can use these templates to resolve problems.
To leverage the QED Templates in smartQED, the first step is to open a free account here. You can then select a template from the QED community library, customize it as you need, and add your own symptoms/clues, notes, attachments and actions to solve your problem. To see the steps, please watch this video.
You can also create your own QED templates and save them in your account for future reuse. If you want to share your knowledge with the QED Community, you can contribute to the QED Template library as well – this feature is coming soon.
Happy problem solving!
Founder & CEO
smartQED, Inc.
I’m Terry Gallagher, co-founder of smartQED. I have worked in the IT industry in the Silicon Valley for many years. I initially started as a developer, went on to manage developers, and then moved on to manage IT Operations & Support teams for business-critical systems.
In my role as a Crisis Manager I have facilitated the resolution of many urgent incidents and problems. During this process I realized that my team and I needed better tools to collaborate and coordinate amongst ourselves while we investigated problems.
One of the methodologies we followed for complex problems is the Fishbone Analysis . It provides a very systematic way to explore and manage potential causes. It is one of the main Quality Tools recommended by Six Sigma, and heavily used in a variety of industries.
Couple years ago, I started working with the smartQED team to design a ‘smart’ system for problem analysis using the Fishbone Diagram. We have built it based on our own insight and experiences, a tool that we ourselves love to use for our own problem investigations. Whether or not you use the smartQED app , there is much value in having a free library of Fishbone templates to help solve common problems in all domains.
I hope you will find the information on this website useful, and help us build it up together into an extensive library of problem-solving knowledge captured in the form of all kinds of fishbones.
Thank you and good luck!
Co-founder & Head of Customer Solutions
smartQED, Inc.
