Root Cause Analysis? Think Again!

Have you spent a lot of money training personnel on RCA and not gotten the ROI you desired? Do you have a sustainable RCA program? Have you put a program in place only to find out that over time it slowly fades away? Have you ever wondered what causes that? This paper offers up some possible reasons and potential solutions to this dilemma. In many companies, RCA is most likely approached as something that can be done in everyone's spare time. Provide some training and send them out to save money. In many cases this is done without the facilities upper management knowledge or full support. This inevitably leaves it vulnerable to the "I'll get around to it" mentality and at the mercy of the people that probably already have too much to do. Two things are needed, first a program such as defined above to move the facility to a new culture or "way of thinking". Second is an audit type of program to insure the program is achieving its intended ROI. The paper will also touch on second order change - basically second order change is change that is self-sustaining. Ask yourself - will your program sustain itself it the program champion is promoted, retires, or leaves the company? If not then you will never achieve your intended results and return for your investment and you haven't achieved second order change. Getting the most out of your training dollars is important and many companies are willing to spend the money but do they track the value of their investment. It is necessary to put together a training plan along with resource allocation, sponsorship, expected ROI and tracking metrics to insure you get the most bang for your buck. A proposed methodology will be presented to insure the value of an RCA program is captured.