ROOT CAUSE ANALYSIS

HOW EFFECTIVE IS YOUR RCA RESULTS/EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS?

Root Cause Analysis is a tool that is used to identify the root cause of a problem and proffer effective solutions that will prevent the problem from re-occurring.

Findings show that about 95% of the 5-Whys RCA results are defensive. They intend to look at the root cause at a technical level. Going further than this, will lead to looking at human and system faults. Nobody will like to lose his job or to be blamed over a problem and as a result of this, team look for what wasn’t done rather than what actually happened that caused the problem. As a result of this, it was observed that finding the root cause and implementing the solution at this level still didn’t solve the problem as it will re-occur again.

Have we thought of Causal Reasoning?

Going beyond technical issues to dig deeper into what actually happened or what was actually done that caused the problem. In this case, human factors (actions and decisions) will come into play. This will go further to look into system errors (leaders) that made human behave the way they did.  Findings show that addressing a problem from this level leads to a permanent solution. Most of the causes of a problem happened as a result of human actions and decisions some of which will come from management.

  But how many times have we investigated our failures up to this point? This is because maintenance and operation team in organizations still see RCA as witch-hunting or blame activities. No team or persons will like to be indicted or blamed over a particular failure thereby hiding a lot of information that could lead to a better result. This fear has been a major setback in achieving a better RCA result. RCA is an important tool in a continuous improvement activity and have to meet its aims and objectives.

What are the objectives of a quality RCA?

Narrowing down to equipment reliability in oil and gas production, the following are the objectives of an RCA:

To prevent equipment failure re-occurrence

Increase equipment availability and MTBF

Reduce maintenance cost of equipment

Increased/sustained production

Factors affecting RCA quality:

Consequence management:

The team members have the fear that management will punish anyone found to be the cause of the failure. They don’t have the assurance that nobody will be penalized over the cause of failure. When this happens, the team members go defensive in the investigation and this will affect the result.

Blame:

Another setback in the quality of RCA is the fear of blame over a failure. Nobody wants to take the responsibility of the failure and it causes problem between maintenance and operations team. Maintenance team equally pushes blame among various disciplines that are involved.

Lack of quality data/information:

RCA is an evidence/fact based investigation. Every failure has to be examined thoroughly by checking the data available, interviewing the personnel that interact with the equipment, consulting OEM manuals, equipment history (PMs  & CMs) etc.  When these are lacking, it will affect the result.  

What are the ways forward?

RCA is an important tool in a continuous improvement process. We strive to do things in a better way for process effectiveness. Organizations should drive the process in a way that will yield better result by ensuring that they put strategies in place to monitor the process. Organizations should do the following to achieve a better result from RCA:

• Every maintenance and operations team members should be trained on how to carryout RCA using causal reasoning.
• They should ensure that team members don’t see RCA as blame activities
• They should also put evidence in place to convince the team members that nobody will be penalized as a result of RCA findings.
• Ensure that correct data is kept to aid investigation
• Provide a database that effective solutions emanated from RCAs can be tracked to ensure complete close out of the actions
• Develop a standard KPI that will be used to monitor results