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moftz
Not one mention of a fishbone diagram?
com
Root cause analysis, in the simplistic form, without a fishbone tree of events and failed controls, means that failure is inevitable. Again and again.

Edit: This document is actually cool: it uses RCA as a term and actually teaches failure analysis!

mdaniel
In their "defense," this looks like another thinly veiled "look how are awesome tool solves problems, call now!" article and not a book in any fashion whatsoever.

We've enjoyed great success with the post-mortem templates in PagerDuty, which is part of their open-source incident-response-docs https://github.com/PagerDuty/incident-response-docs/blob/130...

causelink
Thanks for the question. Our experience is that the causal analysis method described in the eBook is a more effective way to understand the causes of a problem and find effective solutions. We often discuss the pros/cons of different RCA methods in our free webinars and we have one about Fishbone in June. Feel free to sign up http://www.sologic.com/root-cause-analysis-training/rca-webi....
plouffy
I'm surprised that gathering data comes before create the problem statement. Surely if you aren't sure what you're actually trying to show, it's unlikely that you can effectively find it.
oceanghost
If you're into problem identification, may I recommend "Are your lights on?"

It's a masterpiece.

causelink
Looks like a good book - thanks!
simplegeek
Just a minor nit. Both the mention of fishbone diagram (and an example) and 5-whys would have made it tad better.
causelink
Yes, we mention that there are other methods but decided not to go into detail about each one. Based upon the comments we're getting, it sounds like we could have gone a bit further in describing the other methods available. Thanks for the feedback.