How Do I Start an Investigation?

I often find that many people just don’t know how to start an investigation. Do I interview somebody? Do I need to get my questions together? Heck, what questions do I need to ask? Figuring out that very first step is sometimes the most frustrating part of an investigation.

This confusion comes up because most people (not familiar with TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis) don’t have any guidance on getting started. 5-Whys hopes you hit on the right “Why #1” to get moving in the right direction. Learning Teams often toss around some ideas, but it’s pretty unstructured.

Here’s a Simple Way to Start an Investigation

Luckily, TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis provides excellent guidance on getting started. Step #1 in the TapRooT® RCA process is “Find out what happened and build a SnapCharT®”. SO DO THAT!! As soon as you get that first email or the initial phone call (“Joe Smith caught his finger in the storage bin this morning on the loading dock”), draw the SnapCharT®. Use whatever data you already have to chart out what you know. As soon as you start building it, you’ll almost immediately see questions you need to ask and holes in your knowledge. Grab the TapRooT® Root Cause Tree® and figure out what additional questions you need to ask to fill in some of those holes.

Your SnapCharT® will probably be 80% questions… that’s OK. You now have a starting point for your investigation. Figure out who you need to talk to, what records you have to review, and what policies might have been in place to answer these questions. You might take 15 minutes to do all of this, but you now have a structured plan on where to go next.

The TapRooT® process is meant to make your investigations easy by providing structured guidance through every step of the process. Getting started is just that first step in quickly completing your investigation. As Julie Andrews sang, “Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start.”

Now that you know how to start an investigation, discover the full power of TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis. Get trained, get structured, and get results.