A Meticulous Guide to Help You Identify Causes in A Project with Root Cause Analysis

Why analyze mistakes in a project?

Mistakes, errors, and accidents are inevitable in a project undertaking, but the important thing is that they should not be repeated. You can ensure this by finding the prime cause that led to the error or accident. Root Cause Analysis helps you with it. It is a tool to identify causes of problems in a project and focus on the primary ones.

One of the major reasons to use root cause analysis is to avoid failure of the project management team and prevent failure of a plan that will have cost implications.

An efficient project manager should monitor the results when working on a project. That is what helps you identify the issues at the onset. Conducting a Root Cause Analysis is a five-step process, and it helps to determine the cause of a project problem :

Assigning Resources

The Root Cause Analysis starts with assigning resources. First, you need to identify and assign the right people or resources to help you analyze the situation and come to a conclusion.

Problem Identification

The very second step to Root Cause Analysis is to find out the exact issue and its impact. Questions like what happened? Who was involved or affected? When did it happen? Where and how did it happen? Are addressed in this stage. Again, it is important to maintain proper documentation of this entire process.

Analysis of the problem and isolation of the main cause

Once the above data is gathered, the next step is to analyze the problem and reach the main cause. The main goal of this exercise is to identify what caused the problem. You can use a fishbone diagram, Pareto Chart, A Scatter diagram, or other tools to pinpoint the main cause.

Identify and implement the remedial action

After isolating the cause, you can focus on finding the best remedial action and then implementing it. It might include various participants, timelines, test scenarios, etc.

Result Verification

The problem was identified, and remedial action was taken. Now it is time to confirm if the actions taken proved effective or not, and if the main issue is fixed. Therefore, it is important to document the entire process. You can organize your notes answering the following queries :

• Do you still have the same problem?
• How effective is the solution?
• Did you consider other potential solutions?
• Did it have an impact on any other areas?

What Is Root Cause Analysis?

Root Cause Analysis is an approach to help you to identify problem causes in project management. It points to the origin point of the issue and helps you isolate the problem.

Root Cause Analysis does not focus on the elimination of the core issue. However, with the help of this method, you can isolate what happened, why, where, and when it happened. This will help the project leader to fix the problem.

Tools

Some of you might be wondering what are the tools used for project management? There are various options available that can help with managing your projects successfully. Some of the common project issue management tools are Trello, Jira, Wrike, and Workflowmax.

When is it Useful?

Root Cause Analysis is done when the project manager observes an issue. The prime purpose of the Root Cause Analysis is to help with the early detection of the prime reason behind the problem.

It is important that project leaders perform the Root Cause Analysis as soon as possible to observe any problems with the project. Waiting for long might lead to further complications and affect the performance and errands of the project.

Why is it Important?

Let us answer that question with another question. How do you identify defects in a project? There are various options for defects detection in a project, but Root Cause Analysis proves to be most beneficial since it helps to identify causes in a project. Once pointed to the origin point, the project leaders can devise a strategy to resolve an issue in a project.