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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