5W1H or Kipling method is a set of 6 questions that help us answer basic elements of a problem.
Problem Statement
Have you ever wondering why you failed to achieve or finish some of the pre-planned work? All of us have been there sometimes or other.
What is experience?
Experience is not the number of years you worked in corporate. It is the number of problems you faced and solved them over the years.
An important part of experience is finding root cause of the failed projects or work. This helps us understand what mistakes we did and ensure we do not repeat them in future. Please note, this project can be both personal and professional.
Table of Contents
How to retrospect or plan
There are many ways. One of the ways to retrospect is 5W1H or Kipling method. This is not only used for retrospection, but also planning new goals, so that we understand things needed to finish the goal.
This is where we ask 6 questions:
5W1H or Kipling Method
5W1H or Kipling method is just a set of 6 questions.
Who
- Who needs to be involved to achieve the goal. It tell us about the dependency on some other person. It not only include person but may be some things too.
- Example:
- For a software project release, do we have dev-ops person available on the planned release date? If no, what are the other options?
- Before planning for a vacation in some other country, do whole family have Passport and Visa ready?
What
- What exactly we want to achieve? What is the end goal?
- What we will have (outcome) to call this goal as success (Definition of Done)
- Example:
- Plan an advertising campaign and invest say ₹ 1,00,00,000 for that. Good, we got the budget but why we want to do that? What is return of investment, stakeholders are expecting?
When
- The deadline.
- Some goals, if done after a specific deadline, are useless. We need to be very clear about deadlines.
- Example:
- Surprise birthday party for your spouse. It is useless if not done before birthday.
- Submitting a proposal before last date of a tender.
Where
- Location: It could be physical (City, address, Meeting room) or virtual location (Video call link)
- It may not apply everywhere, but many times it may.
- Example:
- Planning for a vacation? Where will we go? When will we go and is it a good season for that location?
- Scheduled a video call with stakeholders or client, how and where they should join?
Why
- Why we want to do this? How it will help us achieving our bigger goals and plan. We need to understand the big picture for that.
- Example
- Why we setup that Goal in the first place? What is the big picture? How it will help us in future?
How
- Last but not least, how will we achieve the goal?
- This is the planning phase.
- A goal without a plan, is definitely going to fail.
How to apply the method?
I hope you understood these questions?
The next questions is, how to use that practically? Well, you may want to check our PowerUser series, where we explained the whole process, right from the beginning and include all the required resources like this one.