People don't participate in root cause analysis

Ed Panek said:

Root cause analysis is very much a finger-pointing avoidance so make sure you look at root causes holistically rather than personally as much as possible.

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Bingo. Many people mistakenly believe that RCA is an exercise in blame assignment. Instead of an exercise in what systemic failure must be addressed, many uneducated workers, even at management level and beyond, erroneously assume it is an exercise to find who was at fault. And most people don’t like to participate in a witch hunt.

So to summarize, the top reasons for poor ‘RCA’ are:
1. CAs on trivial things
2. Lack of training and expert guidance
3. The search for root blame
4. Management direction to improve things

Bev D said:

So to summarize, the top reasons for poor ‘RCA’ are:
1. CAs on trivial things
2. Lack of training and expert guidance
3. The search for root blame
4. Management direction to improve things

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I can mostly control those items to an acceptable level if I could just get the darn resources, i.e. if we worked even half as hard at preventing recurrence of systemic problems as we did at maintaining production volume.

More bad product faster!

Bev D said:

More bad product faster!

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In essence, yes.

YMMV, but I'm dead serious when I say that, outside of QA staff, at every company I can think of being personally involved with over the past many years, virtually no one ever worked/works OT/weekends to get a CA done on time, or to experiment on ways to improve processes, but they work OT virtually every month to get more product shipped.

I've experienced the President of a division of a US company with ~ $4B in revenue knowingly ship bad product to get credit for the shipout dollars on the last day of the month, knowing it would be rejected and returned for rework by the customer.

Two of the biggest lies told by modern upper managers/corporate leaders are any variation of "quality is job one" and "people are our most important resource". Watch what they do, not what they say.

Mike S. said:

I've experienced the President of a division of a US company with ~ $4B in revenue knowingly ship bad product to get credit for the shipout dollars on the last day of the month, knowing it would be rejected and returned for rework by the customer.

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That's called a bad measurement system. Worked exactly as designed.

Roles and responsibilities are not properly assigned, ("is not their problem")- Confusion between Role and position.
Management must asign responsibility and authority to the role considering people´s compentence/critical thinking (among other). Because...
People don´t care if that responsibility is not well adressed on their job description.
People don´t understand "SIPOC" process interactions, "process owner".
People has a cognitive bias or insufficient training (or both ).

Steve Prevette said:

Just to clarify - is your employer not doing any root cause analyses, or are they doing root cause analyses and you want to be on the team to do the root cause analysis and "they" won't let you? As an observation, where I worked you had to be "qualified" in root cause analysis, and do a few "under instruction" to get to be assigned to do them.

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Agreed with Steve. QA staff must be qualified enough to effectively participate in RCAs. I personally do not believe the management is not concerned about RCA at all. The management may not be able to tell the root cause, but in most cases, they can somehow allocate the "area of expertise" required for the (important) task. And while they are looking for right person(s) to assign the task, they may look hesitant - smile. Even if you are not chosen to task, keep an eye on the case. If it's indeed not adequately followed thru, then... (you know what to do in such a quality environment).