Root Cause Analysis Workshop

Do you have the same problems occurring over and over? Are your retrospectives showing the same problem sprint after sprint, release after release? Have you heard the phrase “Shift Left, Then Down” but have had no success with the “Down” part?

If any of these questions are familiar to your organization, this workshop may provide the solution. Based on 20+ years on experience with lessons learned, retrospectives, and root cause analysis, The workshop is a combination of a lecture with exercises to understand the why, what, and how of Root Cause Analysis followed by a series of RCA sessions with your people and your problems.

This two day workshop on Root Cause Analysis (RCA) has two components:

• One day of lecture with two example case studies
• One day with four 1 ½ hour Root Cause Analysis sessions

The primary focus and content of the workshop will be the section on “Techniques for Resolving Root Causes” and the actual use of RCA on real problems in your organization

Day One
Day one will be a lecture/discussion of the fundamentals of Root Cause Analysis to include:

• Definition of Defect Prevention
• Defect Prevention “Maturity” 
• Prerequisites for Defect Prevention
• Defect Prevention Process
• Techniques for Resolving Root Causes (primary focus)
• Taguchi (Fishbone) diagrams
• 5-Why
• Apollo
• Class Exercises
• Measuring Defect Prevention
• Starting and Maintaining a Defect Prevention Program

Day Two
Day two will be divided into four 1 ½ hour facilitated workshop sessions where real defects will be analyzed by 4-5 person teams drawn from the Day One attendees. The defects analyzed could be production or test defects selected by the Client class coordinator or problems the organization has identified that need resolving (the latter are particularly suited to teams of managers). Recurrent problems or “do betters” identified in Agile/Scrum retrospectives are also appropriate.