SURVEY: Where would you like to see better RCAs?

I think many companies have an initial idea of where they want to focus their improvement efforts to see better RCAs. We can’t fix everything at once, so concentrating only on those areas that seem to need the most attention would APPEAR to make sense.

However, I think we need to be careful with this line of thinking. There are some problems to think about:

• How do we determine this initial focus? Did we use sound analytics to define those “areas of interest”? Or are we going off gut feel?
• Even with decent analytics, it’s easy to miss other areas that need attention. If I’m a safety guy, for example, it might not occur to me to check out my quality department. My analysis was limited to my HSE programs, and I did not expand the scope enough to examine areas outside my expertise.
• Once we start RCAs in a specific area, it can be difficult to look beyond that area later. We get stuck looking only at this one area and don’t expand our opportunities for improvement into new areas.

While I certainly understand the tendency to start investigations in a very specific area, I submit that you should look across your business right from the start. There are lots of opportunities for improvement across the company.

With this in mind, I’d like your input on additional areas within your company where it could be beneficial to institute human performance-based root cause analysis. Where would you like to see additional investigations performed? Leave a comment and let me know where you think would benefit from good root cause analysis.