Root Cause Analysis Tips

Are You Continuously Improving Your Improvement Initiatives? Does your continuous improvement need continuous improvement? That’s the topic of this article. What will you learn? • What is Good Enough• How To Improve• Sponsorship• Program Analysis• Root Cause Analysis• Never Stop Improving What is Good Enough? Maybe your program is good enough. You can rest on your laurels. After all, your safety improvement efforts (or quality, Six Sigma, Lean, TPM, patient safety, or other improvement programs) are producing slightly better than …

Does Your Root Cause Analysis Need Improvement I was at a conference, and one of the talks was about advanced root cause analysis. The presenter’s company had a “homegrown” root cause analysis system. They discovered that they were not getting consistent results. Improvement was needed! They studied their system and discovered something missing—management system causes. In the TapRooT® System, we have called these “Generic Causes” since we copyrighted the first TapRooT® Manual in 1991.  It made me think … Why did …

Just Be Careful When someone claims that people “not being careful” is a major source of accidents, then I’m almost certain that they aren’t looking for the real, correctable causes of problems. Here is a Story to Illustrate the Point A safety manager at a refinery once challenged me. He claimed that the only way to get people to do the right thing regarding safety was to be like a cop and give them a ticket when they violated the …

Time and Tide Wait for No Man(Reprinted and updated from the May 2014 Root Cause Network™ Newsletter. Used by permission.) TIME SPENT Some TapRooT® Users lament: “I don’t get enough practice using TapRooT® to be good at finding root causes.” Why do they say that? Because they only use TapRooT® to investigate major accidents. For most TapRooT® users, major accidents are few and far between. Not having major accidents is good, so this complaint isn’t all bad. But why aren’t …

When Was the Last Major Military Procurement That Wasn’t Behind Schedule and Over Budget? The new Columbia Class submarine is behind schedule and over budget. The GAO is projecting that these delays may make the new sub unavailable for deployment commitments in 2030 and, thus, impact military readiness. To make matters worse, the GAO says even more schedule and cost problems could affect the other 11 submarines in the class if the root causes of delays and cost overruns are …

How is Root Cause Analysis Used? Root cause analysis is frequently used by safety and quality professionals to improve performance by analyzing the causes of accidents and issues and correcting their root causes (so the accidents/issues don’t happen again). In addition, forward-thinking companies apply root cause analysis proactively to prevent safety accidents and quality issues BEFORE they happen. (CLICK HERE for more information about proactively using TapRooT® RCA.) More Ways to Use Advanced Root Cause Analysis But where else should advanced …