Johannesburg, 31 Jul 2019
Albert Einstein said: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
So why do we do root cause analysis? Average enterprises suffer more than 61 hours of downtime each year and an initial 54% of that downtime is wasted just trying to determine who should fix it.
Organisations also struggle when it comes to major incident protocols, where all the stakeholders have conflicting approaches on how to get to the root cause, further exacerbating the already tense situation.
Pink Elephant SA has also identified that organisations struggle when it comes to IT problem management when time-sensitive questions such as: who should be involved in the investigations, what steps are involved in root cause analysis before and after and most importantly, what technique should be used to get to the root cause?
Pink Elephant South Africa has added a Root Cause Analysis Specialist course to its training portfolio to assist organisations on how to better handle major incidents and do problem determination. This course gives those involved in getting to the root of the incident or problem enhanced skills to assist their organisations to reduce negative impacts such as loss of revenue and reputational damage.
So when should we do root cause analysis?
When we want to respond to one or more incidents, or when doing trend analysis and we want to implement improvement opportunities. The goal is to analyse what happened, how it happened and why it happened, so that we can put actions in place to prevent re-occurrence. The RCA team should be committed and skilled to find the root cause, not to place blame.
Pink Elephant's RCS course teaches the delegates five techniques to get to the root cause of a major incident or problem and how to use the new skills through the use of scenario-based exercises. The course gives the delegates a working knowledge of brainstorming, affinity mapping, Ishikawa (Fishbone), five whys and Kepner-Tregoe techniques.
* Anele Segoane has been in the service management industry for over three years, having begun her IT career on the IT service desk.
She is an accredited ITIL V3 expert and has a huge passion for the service desk. She is accredited to train service desk-specific courses and does coaching of service desk teams.
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