One of the staples of our Lean journey is a monthly root cause analysis (RCA) effort. The results of the team standard have surpassed my expectations, and I anticipate more potential positive results as we mature our approach. Our playbook is simple to execute, but requires disciplined execution and adherence to standard to recognize benefit and produce long term benefits.
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Prerequisite Activities
- Train team members on the fundamentals and business reason to use RCA.
- Create team standards for documentation and frequency of RCA events.
- Establish place on visual management board to post active, completed, and future RCA documents.
Execution
- In the frequency designated by the team standard, determine the process,procedure, or result as the subject for the RCA.
- Decide who the point person is to manage the current RCA effort.
- Analyze and document
- Define the problem
- Determine why the problem happened.
- Determine a solution to prevent the problem from happening again.
- Post results to management board
Organizational Adhesive
- Review progress of active RCAs and results of completed RCAs during weekly team meetings.
- Use managers as both participants and assignment owners.
- Audit adherence to department standards and post results on team audit board.
- Use the management board to put placeholders for RCAs that will happen in the future.
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A monthly cadence works well for our environment. It is frequent enough to keep problem solving active, but not so frequent to disrupt operational activities. We have found that RCAs which require more than a month of work to resolve should be classified as a project so we can keep the monthly cadence of RCA events.
The best part is living with the results and preventing problems from repeating. So far, we’ve not had any of the problem repeat that we’ve solved for in a RCA. I guess that’s the whole point.
Onward and Upward!