Root Cause Analysis

"Judge a person by their questions, rather than their answers.”

Voltaire

Root Cause Analysis is a set of methodologies within the field of quality management and quality control. Over the years, with the increasing complexity of systems, processes and manufacturing there has come a need for staff to be able to efficiently analyse problems and find key faults in a given system. Root Cause Analysis or RCA provides a set of tools that facilitate this process.

This course is centred around a set of useful tools within RCA that can help a variety of fault finding applications. The best way to learn these techniques is by example and plenty of examples are provided in the course. Delegates then get to practice these techniques by going through a number of exercises.

The main aim of an RCA analysis is to find root causes for a given problem so it can be addressed. It is ultimately about prevention and focusing on what matters the most. RCA is often iterative and the tools need to be used in succession and conjunction with each other in order to derive accurate and meaningful results.

This course is ideal for delegates interested in problem solving, decision making, impact analysis, fault finding, reliability and process control. The RCA tools help identify symptoms, impact, consequences and effects. It helps identifying areas that their improvement can lead to significant gains.

In this highly practical course participants will learn:

RCA Process

• What is Root Cause Analysis (RCA)?
• What are the steps involved in an RCA process?
• What methodologies are used within RCA?
• What are various types of causes?
• What are best practice guidelines when performing an RCA?
• What are pitfalls of RCA that you need to be aware of?

5 Whys

• What is the 5 Whys technique?
• How can you use it for RCA?

Questioning Skills

• How can you use a structured approach to make sure you ask the right questions?
• How to use this structured approach to make sure you ask a diverse set of questions about all areas?

Evaluating Impact of Change and Decisions

• How to look forward to evaluate the impact of a change or a new decision on the current state?
• How to use this forward looking approach systematically and correctly to get meaningful results?

Cause and Effect Diagrams

• What is a cause and effect diagram?
• What is a fishbone diagram?
• How can you use this technique to search for root causes?

Pareto Analysis

• What is Pareto principle?
• How can you use the Pareto Principle to prioritise your RCA approach systematically?

Impact Analysis

• What is impact analysis?
• How can you use a powerful matrix to focus on high-risk areas first?
• What are the 5 steps involved in an impact analysis?

Audience: Anyone

Prerequisites: None

Course Duration: 1 Day

Course Level: Beginners & Intermediate 

By the end of this course the delegates will be able to:

• Use a step by step approach to apply RCA, know what methods to use at each step and avoid common pitfalls
• Use a structured approach to question the cause of a given problem and dig deeper to find the underlying issue
• Apply the 5W1H technique to generate clusters of questions centred on a given category to investigate a problem
• Use a questioning technique to consider the consequences of an upcoming change
• Use cause and effect diagrams to visually capture the relationship between causes and effects to find faults
• Use the Pareto Principle and a step by step approach to focus your attention on what matters the most
• Use a powerful matrix to identify high risk areas so you can focus on them first

Root Cause Analysis is an extensive subject. There are many complex tools used under RCA which require specialised software solutions such as FMEA or Fault Trees. The purpose of this course is to familiarise the delegates with the most important tools in RCA without overwhelming them. RCA is about problem solving and as such can be quite taxing. Many tools in RCA may appear simplistic or straight forward. The real power comes from the way they are used and the data that is fed into them. Such principles are extremely important and the purpose of this course is to make sure delegates learn the fundamental lessons under the controlled environment of a training course. Later, they can learn about new methods or more industry-specific methods and having gone through the training provided by this course they would know how to correctly approach them.