RCA – Why – Part 1

Why bother with Root Cause Analysis on Defects? We have enough to do without adding to the work!

  1. We found a defect.
  2. We fixed the defect.
  3. We retested the defect.
  4. We closed the defect (pending success on item 3).
  5. Enough said. Let’s move on to something else!

We acknowledge that once we have a defect, all of the above have to occur (hopefully only once and not repeatedly). But Root Cause Analysis is intended to prevent 1 – 5 ever coming back to bother us again. The key word is ever! We never want to see that defect again. In order to do that, we need to find out where it occurred, why it occurred; and make sure that combination never comes up again. In the long term this saves us a lot of money and time and allows us to concentrate on more important items.

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Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash

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