Our life is full of changes. We change apartments, cars, work, accept a new position, start learning, etc. We make a lot of changes at our work too – maintain equipment, clean the products, change vendors, and hire or fire people. And we can continue the list of possible changes endlessly. The question is, do we need these changes or not? Are they innovations or just changes? In most cases, people don’t bother much to analyze or even think about the reason for any change they make. Here, let’s do the simple analysis that everyone should do. And we’ll do…
Root cause analysis is one of the most popular tools in the problem solving process. And, the majority of people, honestly believe that once the root cause is found, the problem is solved. That is an incorrect statement. In this article, we want to explain why. What is the root cause? First, we should understand what the root cause actually is. In our vision, the root cause is not necessarily the fundamental reason for the problem. We like to split the definition into two reasons: Fundamental Reason of the Problem (FRP) – this is the original source of the problem….
It is about problem solving tools. “You never saw such a commotion up and down a house, in all your life, as when my Uncle Podger undertook to do a job.” – this is from “Three Men in a Boat” by Jerome K. Jerome, chapter “Uncle Podger hangs a picture”. You can enjoy reading the famous book again and again, but this particular chapter exactly corresponds to our topic, creative thinking tools. What is most important to our topic is that Uncle Podger used tools: “Now you go and get me my hammer, Will,” he would shout; “and you bring…
Root cause analysis (RCA) is a practical problem-solving tool. Once a root cause found we can concentrate on the solution that is related to the found root cause. A definition of a Root Cause is extremely important for the problem-solving process. We should clearly define and understand what a Root Cause is. Otherwise, RCA becomes completely useless, besides a problem will not be solved. What is Root Cause? Everyone remembers a traditional definition: ROOT CAUSE IS A FUNDAMENTAL REASON FOR THE OCCURRENCE OF THE PROBLEM. This definition is very popular and clear, but we have to take into account the…