In medicine, a good doctor needs to understand the difference between treating the symptoms and curing the condition. For example, giving painkillers to a patient with a broken arm will only take away the symptoms; surgery is probably the right way to help bones heal gradually.
Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a systematic process that's used to identify the fundamental cause of a problem. With the help of associated proper tools, it tries to identify the origin of the primary cause of the problem using a specific set of steps. By doing so, we can determine the following:
- What happened?
- How did it happen?
- Why did it happen?
- What proper approach would be used to prevent or reduce it so that it never happens again?
RCA assumes that an action in one place triggers another action in another place, and so on. By tracing the action chain back...