Many organizations have requirements for reporting incidents that include categorizing the general cause of the incident. Common categories for incidents include personnel error, procedure error, or equipment failure. This method of reporting incidents leads to the question of how the categories relate to the of the incident.
The reason for assigning incidents and problems to predefined categories is to collect data on the types of problems that have occurred and establish trends in the numbers of problems occurring in each category. These trends could highlight systemic issues with the organization’s investigation program or with the organization as a whole. However, determining which category should be used for a particular problem is not a root cause analysis.
The purpose of a root cause analysis is to determine the best solutions to prevent problems from occurring. Finding the best solutions requires identifying all of the causes of the issue and getting specific enough about the causes to be able to develop specific, effective solutions. A root cause analysis cannot stop at causes such as “personnel error,” but must (1) delve into the underlying causes behind the personnel error and (2) ask what else had to happen, besides the personnel error, for the incident to occur.
Once a thorough root cause analysis is completed, then the most appropriate category (or categories) for the incident can be determined based on a complete understanding of all of the causes of the issue.
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