Unique Ways to Use RCA
When people think about ways to use RCA, they are usually thinking about only their specific department or use-case. For example, the HSE department will perform a root cause analysis for an environmental release, and a quality inspector will apply it to a product deficiency. But there are SO many other opportunities to apply human performance-based RCA in your business. Think of all the areas in your company that have problems, and imagine what it would look like if those problems were attacked with a world-class RCA system!
Here are some other ways to use RCA:
Near Misses
Why wait until someone actually gets hurt before you decide to investigate? Almost every investigation I’ve been involved in has someone say, “Oh yeah. That’s been a problem for a while. It just never caused an injury.” Very few mistakes or problems are unique or first-time problems. They are hanging around your company, just waiting for the opportunity to catch you. Fix those minor issues when they are still minor; don’t wait for a major failure.
Proactive Findings
Similar to the above, I’ll bet we are making errors every day during our normal daily routines. Are we looking for them? Are we performing observations and audits to identify those problems? And when we DO find issues proactively, do we apply RCA to those findings, or just put Band-Aids on the issues? Treat your audit findings the same way you do your investigations. Look for root causes of those findings, and then apply solid corrective actions to those root causes.
IT Issues
It seems like we just accept problems with computer equipment instead of treating these issues the same way we do other problems. We did a software update incorrectly? We’ll make sure we “do better next time.” But what if next time that incorrect update drops your server during a critical operation, and you end up losing data, damaging equipment, or taking production offline for an extended period? A solid RCA would have corrected this the first time.
Project Management
What do you do when a project goes over budget? Do you ever do an analysis of why this occurred? Do you apply the same human performance rigor to this type of problem as you do to a safety issue? Lots of opportunity for improvement.
Repeat Issues
This can occur anywhere in your company. Equipment failures, broken lifting gear, missing safety equipment, etc. If you find yourself fixing the same thing over and over, you can perform an RCA of the reasons for both the failure itself AND why it continues to occur.
Good Things Happened!
I’ve been involved in analyses of WHY SOMETHING WENT RIGHT! What a great opportunity to reinforce the good things that happened this time, and make sure we continue to strengthen these processes.
There’s no reason to limit the scope of your investigations to just the “normal” problems. All companies have many things going wrong all the time, and I consider all of these problems “potential improvement opportunities.” The sky’s the limit!!!
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