The Practical Guide to Defect Prevention

Risks of Root Cause Analysis

There are some potential pitfalls with the RCA strategy. For example, without a careful selection of sentinel events, the RCA effort can become a series of glamorized case studies that never yield corrective recommendations or result in any changes. Early RCA pilot programs should focus on high-profile defects—those that directly affect customers—to increase credbility and avoid the “glamorized case study” label.

Another potential risk is bias. RCA findings can be biased in a number of different ways, including hindsight, current tools or process refinements, and unrelated peripheral causes such as management or staffing issues. These can contribute to a bias by influencing the results in a given way. For example, ...