Nicola Crawford, Director Integrated Risk & Governance for the Business Resilience Group in Australia is running a one-off workshop on “Root Cause Analysis (RCA) - a risk management improvement tool”. Members save £50 on the price!

In recent years organisations have come under increasing pressure to produce more with less and to produce higher quality outcomes (products and services) for their stakeholders. Risk events and lost opportunities that impact these outcomes are not acceptable. To remain competitive, your organisation must recognise the changing climate and accept the challenge of achieving better results with fewer resources.

It is often a common practice, either due to lack of time, lack of adequate information or knowledge (or both) that risk events are often investigated at a superficial level. As a result, organisations experience repeated poor performance and become experts at fixing rather than preventing risks.

If you find yourself in this position, root cause analysis (RCA) can benefit your organisation. Why not continue to do it the old way? Why use a structured approach? Risk events provide an opportunity to learn about our organisation’s performance at many levels. By investing resources in an RCA, the organisation solves poor performance once, not repeatedly.

It is no longer sufficient for organisations to learn and improve only from things that go wrong. Using a proactive risk management approach, together with a reactive process of incident management will help in the identification of the things that COULD go wrong.

Learning from experience is critical to organisations’ capability to manage risk and meet stakeholder expectations. This workshop explores ways to help organisations understand the underlying causes of risks and issues and to formulate plans for improving the ability to meet organisational objectives.

Root cause analysis is often used as a retrospective review of a risk event undertaken in order to identify what, how, and why it happened. The analysis is then used to identify areas for change, recommendations and sustainable solutions, to help minimise the re-occurrence of the incident type in the future. The workshop will adopt a more proactive approach -  it explores the fundamentals of root causes analysis and how it can be effectively incorporated into a risk management framework. The presenters will guide participants through the detailed process of recognizing and analysing root causes, which may impact organisational performance and subsequent measure to be taken to mitigate the risks identified.

The training focuses on:

• Problem solving not blame
• Systems and processes
• Human factors and limitations
• Links between cause and effect
• Identifying actual and potential risks
• Identifying underlying organisational causes ad common divers of risks
• Barriers to the elimination of the causes
• Practical approaches and action planning
• Effective communications
• Links between RCA and proactive risk management
• Using RCA to establish key risk indicators and improved assurance processes