What is Root Cause Analysis?

What is Root Cause Analysis?

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a problem-solving strategy that seeks to determine the root cause of a particular problem. This strategy is highly effective because it helps problem solvers resolve the problem at the lowest level, making for efficient and effective solutions that do more than simply put a band-aid on problem’s symptoms.

Root Cause Analysis is also very popular because of the numerous benefits that result from the strategy’s successful implementation. One of these benefits is just how intuitively we naturally gravitate to root cause analysis when dealing with problems in our day to day lives.

As an example, take a pediatrician treating a sick child. Perhaps the child has a fever. The doctor intuitively knows that in order to make the fever go away, you don’t treat the fever but the underlying illness. This usually occurs through the efforts of the body’s immune system, but other interventions like antibiotics are widely used and incredibly effective for the very reason that they treat the illness at the source, the root cause, and not the symptoms.

Executing Root Cause Analysis

As mentioned, RCA is a problem-solving strategy. And with every strategy there should be a variety of tactics that go along to help execute this strategy. In the domain of problem solving, these tactics take the form of different tools and frameworks of analysis that help problem solvers arrive at the root cause.

Technique #1 – 5 Why Analysis

Five Why (5 Why or 5Y analysis) Analysis is perhaps the most widely used and easily understood problem solving technique in the world. Problem solvers across every discipline and organization rely on 5 why analysis to get to the root cause.

It’s popularity is due to all the benefits that come along with 5 why analysis. Five Why Analysis doesn’t require deep subject matter expertise nor does it require any expensive equipment. So for these reasons Five Why analysis is a very inexpensive way to get to the root cause. Likewise, the Five Why technique facilitates a deep yet intuitive understanding of the problem, which makes it easy to present to stakeholders and persuade them towards corrective action.

The one downside that the five why technique has is that it is always a reactive tool. It’s quite impossible to conduct a five why analysis on what went wrong in the future. For preventative measures and risk mitigating strategies, there are other tactics available, but five why is not up for the task.

Technique #2 - Fault Tree Analysis

Fault Tree Analysis (FTA) is another widely used tool within the domain of RCA. FTA proceeds by starting with the problem of what went wrong (or could go wrong) and then deconstructing the problem into many different components, each getting smaller and smaller until you arrive at the root cause of the problem in its most fundamental form.

For instance, imagine you wake up one day jump in the shower and are assaulted by an icy blitz of water. You got an unexpected cold shower, and that is a problem. What caused the cold shower? Why wasn’t there any hot water, by conducting an FTA, we can identify all the critical components of the complex system that go into delivering hot water to the showerhead.

In this example, you’re reacting to a problem – the condition where your shower isn’t delivering hot water. But in some organizations the problems are so dire, so important, that it’s best to predict possible problems that may occur and prevent them from occurring to begin with. In this case, problem solvers would associate a probability of failure to each of the identified components in the FTA. Then proactive countermeasures would be assigned to make the problems less likely to occur – either through more oversight or changes to design.

*As a historical note, FTA started with the US military’s efforts to ensure that our nuclear defense systems would detect incoming rockets and launch retaliatory rockets without fail. The stability of the western world depended on such reliability.  

Technique #3 – Analyzing Failure Modes

 Analyzing the way things break helps us understand a lot more about the limitations of our design. These limitations include potential use cases, user behavior, environments, and other potentialities that could lead to problems occurring. The Analyzing of Failure Modes (Sometimes called Failure Modes and Effects Analysis) 😨is a very powerful tool to methodically observe the way things work and the way things could possibly break. This technique is usually proactive and is done by teams of engineers before a new product or manufacturing process is deployed.

There’s a lot more that can be said about Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) 🤮 that is well outside of the scope of this article. FMEA is an incredibly effective tool. It will not only get to the root cause of problems before they occur, but it will also help you understand what potential failures will look like, likelihood of problems occurring, why they would occur, and what can be done to prevent future occurrences.
For this reason, it is the most high-powered of all the root cause analysis tools. But it also comes with its fair share of drawbacks. Conducting FMEAs are time consuming and expensive. They require lots of cross functional brainpower and subject matter expertise from engineers, maintenance staff, management and end users. A small FMEA will easily take you over 4 hours to complete. Unless your problem is critical to the viability of your business or operation, FMEA is probably overkill for your needs.

Conclusion

Root Cause Analysis is a one of the most effective strategies a problem solver can have to approach a problem. The ability to confidently get passed the symptoms of a problem and affect the root cause is invaluable, saving time, energy, money, and morale. To skillfully execute Root Cause Analysis, you must be well versed in the tools and techniques that are available, employing the right tool for the right problem. This article has outlined the use cases, benefits and drawbacks to three such techniques, Five Why Analysis, Fault Tree Analysis, and Failure Modes and Effects Analysis.