Articles: Root Cause Analysis

3 Steps and 3 Tools that Organize and Improve Your Problem Solving Capability

Basic Elements of a Comprehensive Investigation
By Mark Galley, ThinkReliability

The terms failure analysis, incident investigation, and root cause analysis are used by organizations when referring to their problem solving approach. Regardless of what it’s called there are three basic questions to every investigation: 1 - What’s the problem(s)? 2 - Why did it happen (the causes)? and 3 - What specifically should be done to prevent it.

Improving on the Fishbone Effective Cause-and-Effect Analysis

In 1950s Japan, Kaurou Ishikawa became one of the first to visually lay out the causes of a problem. His fishbone, or "Ishikawa Fishbone," helped visually capture a problem's possible causes and,ltimately, has become a standard in corporate-quality and Six-Sigma programs. It begins with a problem, then identifies possible causes by separate categories that branch off like the bones of a fish. Its categories-typically including materials, methods, machines, measurement, environment and people-can be modified to better match a particular issue.

Prevention or Blame? What is the goal of your Organization?

Solving problems effectively is part of being an effective organization. The individuals and groups that tackle problems in organizations today sometimes inadvertently focus on the people or departments involved rather than the specific causes of the problem. This creates an organizational culture that focuses more on blaming other groups and individuals than preventing problems from occurring.

Root Cause Failure Analysis Web Workshops

Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCFA) has an important place in a complete maintenance program. Root Cause Failure Analysis provides the ability to identify and eliminate preventable root causes of failures.

It can be used in a wide variety of situations and like Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) there are a wide variety of technique variations.

Six Common Errors when Solving Problems

Organizations apply a variety of tools to solve problems, improve operations and increase reliability—many times without success. Why? More than likely, they make one or a combination of six common errors:

1. They focus on blame.
2. Conducting root-cause analysis, they focus on finding one “cause.”
3. They consider a problem description and problem analysis the same thing.
4. They start an investigation by trying to find the problem, instead of identifying an organization’s
goals
5. They apply “buzzwords” instead of the basic technique of cause-and-effect.
6. They use select problem-solving tools for select circumstances.

Overcoming these errors involves knowing why they happen and how to prevent them. Armed with this knowledge, both employees and managers can improve problem-solving in any organization.

The Navy’s Nuclear Work Model applied to the Concorde Crash July-2000

By Lloyd Hamilton, ThinkReliability.com

Originally presented at Reliability 2.0

This paper will discuss advantages of combining Root Cause Analysis techniques and the Navy Work Model.

Where do we end our probe in Root Cause Analysis?

by Rolly Angles, RSA, Laguna Philippines
Frequent contributor at www.maintenanceforums.com

One of the biggest confusion in an attempt to perform a thorough Root Cause Analysis is understanding how deep should we pursue our analysis or simply stated, where do we stop our investigation in performing a Root Cause Analysis? Going to deep will lead us to the bible, Timothy 6:10, For the love of money is a root of all evil and going to shallow will allow the problem to recur again and again.

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