Corrective Action Handbook

Johanna Rothman and Denise Robitaille have written the Corrective Action Handbook. Here's a blurb from Johanna's announcement: Managing Product Development

Corrective action involves defining the problem, gathering data (quantitative and qualitative) to understand the root causes, developing a plan (and obtaining buy-in for that plan), executing the plan, verifying that the plan worked with appropriate results, and then closing out the plan. This handbook helps you do so.

This announcement describes examples where the process was able to help. The goal of good corrective action is to get to the root of the problem and fix that, rather than point fingers and blame the people closest to the problem. This was always a concern when we had accidents or other problems in our pilot plant. It was always convenient to blame the operators, even though the systems (implicit and explicit) created undesirable behaviors, even though people couldn't see it.

One of my favorite tools is "ask 'why?' until you get to a root cause." And don't give up asking. The only way this works, though, is in an open and trusting environment. When people are worried for their jobs, these answers won't come.