Problem Management and Root Cause Analysis at OCIO
As much as we don’t want Incidents or outages to occur with OCIO services, they do occur. The key to avoiding future Incidents and outages is to fully understand their root cause during the Problem Management process.
Problem Management is about discovering the root cause of an outage, working out how to avoid it in the future and spreading that knowledge to the rest of the organization.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is an activity within Problem Management where we aim to reach a shared understanding of the problem and determine the root cause.
If you are invite to attend RCA discussions and meetings, please don’t hesitate to participate. These meetings are not intended to be mysterious or scary.
We have ground rules to help people feel comfortable, safe and to foster creative thinking, including:
- Do aim to reach shared understanding
- Do learn from the Experience
- Do share the outcomes with the rest of the OCIO
- Do not blame or point fingers
- Do not jump to conclusions without data or facts
- Do not judge possible root causes too early
What to expect during a root cause?
- We take our time and describe the problem thoroughly before reaching for root cause
- If there is data we need during the session and we can get it quickly I ask people to retrieve it right away, otherwise we’ll circle back.
- If we have too few or too many possible root causes we’ll take a deliberate look at the distinctions between what, where and when it happened and what, where and when it didn’t happen.
- If we still have too few or too many possible causes we look at recent changes to the affected or supporting systems
Discovering root cause isn’t new to OCIO. My aim with the Problem Management Process is to give you a place to store your root cause activities (Problem Records), some structured root cause analysis when needed and a place to share what you’ve learned.
Problem Management
Improving services by investigating root cause
Kevin Balogh
Defender of Stability
Services Management, Quality & Process Management
balogh.5@osu.edu