Edward Deming, widely acknowledged as the leading management thinker in the field of quality once said, “If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.” Your work processes dictate your results. When problems occur, they are the result of gaps and breakdowns in your process. So how do you make effective, sustainable work process improvements? In this online short course, you’ll learn about one of the most effective tools for evaluating and improving your work process: the process map.

Every sharps incident includes the same, key fundamental cause-and-effect relationships. Knowing these allows you to analyze sharps injuries efficiently—without sacrificing the effectiveness of your investigation. During this two-hour online short course, you will learn the fundamental causal relationship for every sharps injury and how to use that information to conduct a thorough investigation.

How long has it been since your last training with ThinkReliability? In this online short course, you’ll revisit the Cause Mapping method and further hone your problem-solving skills. We will review Cause Mapping concepts and conventions, the basics of cause and effect thinking, cause-and-effect fundamental relationships and common errors by facilitators. The session will culminate into a case study that brings all the pieces together.

The Investigating Human Error short course focuses specifically on how to drive your investigation past many of the common generic stopping points such as “human error." Instead of providing a thorough explanation for the problem, we stop at just the point where further explanation is needed. As a result, solutions are often generic focusing solely on the person. We miss a valuable opportunity for lessons learned to improve and manage by work process.

Have you ever watched a ThinkReliability team member build a Cause Map™ diagram and wished you were as proficient at using the Cause Mapping® template in Microsoft Excel? This course is designed to not only teach you Excel drawing functions, but to go a step further and make you a master of the shortcuts that drive speed and efficiency. We will be going in-depth into the tricks of the trade to get you on track to becoming a mapping pro.

Work processes within your organization should be closely coupled with your problem-solving programs. A problem should be viewed as a signal that indicates where process improvements are needed. This alignment allows leadership and frontline personnel to work together to address safety incidents, operational problems, equipment failures and procedural deficiencies. Building a Cause Map™ diagram reveals the causes that contributed to the problem—revealing effective solutions and identifying specific work processes that need to be changed. From there, process maps clarify work processes that, ultimately, lead to improved human performance. This short course explains how organizations can improve the problem-solving process and make specific, actionable work process improvements.

Root cause analysis (RCA) is typically used for investigating why a problem did occur, so specific solutions can be implemented to prevent it from occurring again. Failure modes effect analysis (FMEA) is used to understand how a problem could happen in the future in an effort to identify what actions should be taken to prevent it. RCA is reactive, and FMEA is proactive. Connecting the two approaches can improve how your organization analyzes, documents, communicates and prevents problems.

During this two-hour online training course, you will learn to dissect some of the troubled work processes within your company. Many organizations mistakenly believe “procedure not followed” is the end of an investigation. Using the Cause Mapping® method, we will show you how it’s a gateway that reveals specifically how to prevent a problem from occurring again. The solutions implemented provide a great example that there’s more than one way to solve a problem. 

Root cause analysis (RCA) is an approach for identifying the underlying causes of an incident, so the most effective solutions can be identified and implemented. Beyond solving problems after they’ve happened, RCA strategies can be applied before, during or after an event to prevent failures and mitigate risk.

Learn to document and facilitate your entire incident investigation using the Cause Mapping Root Cause Analysis template in Microsoft Excel. This online short course will cover some Excel basics and work through a Cause Mapping investigation step-by-step while teaching fundamental skills for using the template and drawing tools in Microsoft Excel and providing insights into facilitating and sharing the findings of an investigation.