problem and it must be possible for the team to perform. Ask the team to suggest actions in the areas they are most familiar with and control. You should take ownership of any Management related actions. Compare each action against these criteria and eliminate any that don’t meet both. Team members should be prepared to explain why they believe an action does not meet the criteria. The team should also agree with a decision to remove an action from the list of candidates.
This exercise may reduce the list to the point where all of the actions would be feasible in which case your exercise is over. If not, ask the team to rank each action against each of the criteria, using a scoring system that assigns a score for feasibility and effectiveness at correcting the problem. You can use a cardinal or ordinal system and you can either average scores or pick the score that receives the most votes. This will identify the actions that will have the greatest chance of eliminating the problem and you can select one or several to implement, depending on the need and your resources.
The final step is to implement the identified actions and observe their effectiveness at removing the problem. You may have to repeat this exercise in order to identify the real root cause and eliminate it, so don’t throw away any of your artifacts, such as the sticky notes, until you have verified that your problem is solved.
You won’t need to use Root Cause Analysis to resolve every project problem, you will be able to identify the causes for most and the ability to resolve them. Problems that defy your ability to solve, or problems you aren’t familiar with will lend themselves to Root Cause Analysis. When the entire team agrees that the problem exists RCA has the advantage that you can use the collective expertise of the team to augment your own and the actions that are identified are identified by the entire team so support for their implementation is much more likely.
Dave Nielsen is a principal with three O Project Solutions, the vendors of AceIt©. Dave was also the key architect responsible for the creation of the product. AceIt© has prepared Project Managers from around the world to pass their PMP® exams. You can find endorsements from some of his customers on three O’s web site (http://www.threeo.ca/).
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