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Root Cause Analysis
The Nine Keys to Successful Deployment
For large global
corporations and government agencies, for mid-sized and small organizations
in all industries and fields, these principles are the ones that will assure
you of a successful deployment of root cause analysis for operations
improvement. Whether they are implemented informally by a small local shop
or formally by a giant, world-wide corporation, these same principles will
produce immediate and sustaining effectiveness, avoid pit-falls and assure
long term success of your root cause analysis program.
That ancient truism
about the first step being the most important step of any journey holds true
in root cause analysis. Nothing substitutes for taking the first step, but
make sure that the step is in the right direction and will lead you to where
you want to be. Observing the following set of principles is your road map
to successful deployment of root cause analysis.
Success Principles
- Establish
executive support: Deploy your
root cause analysis system only after you have substantial support within
the executive management group of your organization. To establish and
sustain success requires a tangible and cultural support within the
organization. Go-it-alone efforts have many pit-falls that can be easily
avoided by gaining broad executive support.
- Select a root
cause analysis system that meets your needs.
This principle determines what quality of
information about your operations problems you will have to work with. The
other success principles detailed here will determine how well you work
with that information. Assess your information needs for success,
establish criteria that your root cause analysis system must meet and
invest in the system that best meets your criteria. Do you need a quick
and informal approach that seeks to get the operation up and running
quickly and that does not require a lot of training? Do you need a method
that supervisors can use to solve their own operations problems? Do you
need a formal approach that will address critical issues and events and
that will require more training? Do you need a system that provides all of
these capabilities? Your expectations and needs will dictate the degree of
formality, time and investment required to produce the kind of results
that will meet your goals.
- Select training
that conveys root cause problem solving and analysis skills.
There are literally hundreds of different sources of training on problem
solving and root cause analysis available: root cause analysis firms,
trade schools, consultants and various universities and junior colleges.
You are interested only in training that focuses upon the transference of
problem solving skills, not general history, stories, descriptions and
characteristics of different root cause analysis techniques, and examples
of what others have done with the different approaches. This will be an
important part of your budget. Do not waste it on general information type
training, or classes that do not prepare your personnel to do credible
analysis. The fundamental success of your program is in the balance here.
- Require root
cause analysis activity. Of
course you will want to require a root cause analysis on major problems.
But, don’t just wait for some major crisis to occur before using your root
cause analysis resources. The most successful root cause analysis programs
are ones that require or have as a growth goal the routine analysis
activity on operations problems; safety, operations, quality, maintenance,
transportation, customer service, legal. There are lots of places and
opportunities to reduce losses and improve operations quality. Use should
not be discretionary. Programs that depend upon trained personnel to find
extra time to spend on analysis of problems usually do not produce
satisfactory results. A workable requirement might be to expect each
trained employee to complete at least one analysis of a “less than crisis”
problem in his area of responsibility each month.
- Set the bar for
analysis. Establish specific
criteria for cases upon which your root cause analysis resources will be
applied. If you are using a system with scalable methodology or multiple
techniques, define the line between using each level or technique.
- Establish
feedback. You will want to
build into your process a way to provide feedback to your trained analysts
who will be routinely investigating problems and providing decision
support information. Once your program is functioning and no longer an
interesting new activity, but rather has become just a routine task, feed
back becomes increasingly important to the sustaining function of the
program. In small companies, a personal note of acknowledgement from an
executive works wonders for injecting incentive and energizing the system.
Mid-sized and large companies can monitor input from analysts and provide
some appropriate form of acknowledgment. While praise may be part of the
feedback, you will also want to explain sometimes why certain options will
not be taken as remedies, so that your trained team never begins to think
that their efforts are being ignored or disregarded.
- Build recognition
into your program. There are
many ways for the organization to demonstrate management’s interest and
the importance of the root cause analysis program. It is best to set in
one or two ongoing programs that will provide incentive and recognition
for activity and performance. Rewards and special events heighten
interest, but will not substitute for the built in dynamic of a monthly
executive review or a monthly newsletter reporting results of individuals
solving problems. These types of programs also serve to provide the
feedback discussed above. Optimally, you will design a program that will
provide ongoing support as well as plan occasional events like an awards
night for the most significant problem solved in each process area, or a
President’s Award for best root cause analysis of the month or year.
- Establish dual
metrics. The name of the game
is “discovery”, to find the sources of counter-quality in your processes.
Organizations need to have a way to recognize needs and a way to
demonstrate progress in improving operations. Organizations typically use
dollars lost and saved as a standard of measurement to determine need and
to document success. In some areas of activity, results are categorized
and the incidence of occurrence within those categories is recorded and
compared. These types of traditional monitors and reporting approaches are
necessary, appropriate, common, and they are based upon a view of the
results of problems. But now you will have an additional and new source of
information; you will have better visibility of the causes of the
problems. You will want to establish a metric that identifies the
incidence of causes, the incidence of interaction between causes and their
association with the internal business processes of your organization.
- View your root
cause analysis data as knowledge.
When a problem is analyzed and actions are taken to resolve it, what you
then do with the resulting data can often be the avenue to the most
benefit from root cause analysis. With visibility of the data, over the
course of a few months, you will begin to see patterns that may not have
been obvious before you were using root cause analysis to examine the
internal systems that have been generating your operations problems. You
will start to detect trends that can provide significant benefits to
planning and strategy. The way people think about problems begins to shift
away from the results of problems to the causes of problems. Instead of
studying only categories and lists of results for clues about problems,
you will want to perceive and analyze how systems in your organization are
forming to produce problems. It is a natural tendency to see these data as
new knowledge when you start to examine, record and analyze what causes
are combining in the business processes of your operations to produce
problems. Regardless of the size and formality of your root cause program,
you will want to build into your procedures a step that has someone
viewing the body of information that has been generated by your root cause
analysis activity. You will be looking for what produced the causes
instead of what the causes produced.
If you are just
getting started, we suggest that you print and distribute this article to
your executive management group. It will serve to inform your executive
managers of the important role they play in the program and of the
commitment necessary to implement and sustain a successful root cause
analysis program. Good luck in your project.
_ _ _
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For more information on how REASON Root
Cause Analysis can be deployed to upgrade your operations improvement
activities, please call (903) 236 9973.
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