Define: "Root Cause Analysis" in Business
Catastrophic fiscal burn
"Finding someone to blame for the network outage. Blame DNS, it's always DNS."
A systematic process for identifying the underlying causes of a fault or problem.
What does "Root Cause Analysis" actually mean?
"A 10-page document written to politely explain that an intern unplugged the core router to use a vacuum cleaner."
"We will conduct a thorough root cause analysis to understand why the server failed."
"After a grueling three-day Root Cause Analysis, we concluded that the system went down because the budget for failover redundancy was spent on a ping-pong table."
By The Chief Waste Officer
18 years in the corporate trenches quantifying waste so you don't have to.
Related Terminology
Tired of hearing this?
Next time someone says "Root Cause Analysis" in a meeting, track exactly how much company money they just wasted. Play Buzzword Bingo, generate a waste invoice, and stop the bleeding.
