Fishbone / Ishikawa Diagram Excel Template

This fishbone diagram template will assist you in identifying the root causes of problems with your processes, and is an essential tool in the continuous improvement toolkit.

The fishbone is an effective way to capture different ideas on root cause and fuel brainstorming with a cause and effect diagram (AKA the Fishbone).

This template will help you display the potential causes for a specific problem or effect, and is tremendously useful if you have little data available to analyse.

To start, generate a problem statement – a question such as “Why is our online basket abandon rate high?”. By asking this you form the head of the fish, and the rest of the body flows from this question.

The remainder of the fishbone consists of several lines (the bones) which represent different categories of questions to ask, such as service industries, process steps, procedures, people, machines, technology/plant, materials, measurements, customers, product – the list can be endless, but crucially it provides structure to finding your root cause(s).

You then ask why does X happen, and once the exercse is complete you will know the drivers of your problem.

Click here to download your free Fishbone / Ishikawa template.