November 14, 2017 | Mark Paradies

Is TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis a Tool or the Whole Toolbox?

What’s in the Toolbox?

I had a self-proclaimed root cause analysis expert tell me that investigators needed lots of “tools” in their root cause analysis toolbox. For most people, that leads to the question:

How many tools do I need to learn?

When we started to develop TapRooT® RCA back in the 1980’s, we thought we just needed a tool. We soon learned that we needed a toolbox. So we went to work finding, developing, and refining the best root cause analysis tools and adding them to our root cause analysis toolbox called the TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis System.

You might ask:

What’s in the toolbox?

The TapRooT® 7-Step Major Investigation Process from Book 4, Using TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis for Major Investigations, shows all the major tools in the right column.

How can you learn these techniques and “fill your toolbox” with tools proven to be successful by TapRooT® Users from around the world? Attend one of our 5-Day TapRooT® Advanced Root Cause Analysis Team Leader Training Courses. See the locations and dates for our public courses around the world HERE.

But why should you learn these tools?

First, we spent decades of research and developing, choosing, improving, and refining these techniques to make them the most successful root cause analysis toolbox in the world. See our user success stories HERE.

The research and testing we performed showed us the limitations of some common root cause analysis tools that some experts try to teach and have trouble getting their students to achieve consistent results. We based our selection of techniques on human factors principles. This makes our system robust yet easy to use.

We also decided to limit the techniques we chose to those that you would really need. Most people don’t get tremendous amounts of experience performing root cause analyses. Thus, we wanted to minimize the training and practice required to use TapRooT®RCA. We made it so that the TapRooT® System can be applied to low-risk incidents (simple incidents) or medium to high-risk incidents. In that way, people get experience applying TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis to simple incidents so that they are practiced using the techniques when something big happens (God forbid).

Also, we built human factors experts systems (AI) into the TapRooT® System to help investigators find the root causes of human errors and equipment problems.

Finally, do other root cause analysis systems provide this course guarantee?

Attend this course, go back to work, and use what you have learned to analyze accidents,
incidents, near-misses, equipment failures, operating issues, or quality problems.
If you don’t find root causes that you previously would have overlooked and
if you and your management don’t agree that the corrective actions that you recommend
are much more effective, just return your course materials/software
and we will refund the entire course fee.

They don’t. Why? Because it is a powerful guarantee. We offer it because of the hundreds of thousands of people we have trained who apply TapRooT® successfully. We know you, too, will be successful.

Why not create your own toolbox?

You could duplicate our efforts and spend decades researching and perfecting your own toolbox of root cause analysis tools. Then you could develop training courses to teach what you learned. But guess what … your system still wouldn’t be as good as TapRooT®. Why? Because while you were doing your research, we would be improving. We constantly make the TapRooT® Books, Training, and Software better.

Besides the feedback we get from thousands of users and from classes we hold around the world, we have a TapRooT® Advisory Board that makes suggestions and reviews improvement ideas. This helps us keep making the best even better.

And one last advantage that we have … very talented instructors. We have 50+ instructors at various locations around the world that have extensive experience teaching and using the TapRooT® System. And these instructors are constantly sharpening their skills.