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IT Root Cause Analysis

Learn how we assist clients to solve the seemingly unsolvable IT problems. Our innovative and award winning RCA tools deliver measurable results.

Do you want to improve up-time of critical systems while reducing operational costs? It does sound impossible, doesn't it? This is possible, however, when you understand the cause and effect relationships between costs, availability and the occurrence of incidents.

Let's start from the beginning. The contributing factors to poor service availability have been proven as a combination of the following:

• System Downtime – Whenever a team experiences an outage, it is normally due to an incident that occurred, i.e., a system breach or excessive time to bring up a system once it has failed. This is aggravated by the in-house tendency of prolonged decision cycles with escalations of both decisions and incidents when they cannot be resolved at the source.

• Level of Re-work – The IT professional has to be content with recurring incidents, which in turn have a major effect on costs, staff productivity and morale. On many occasions, we see decisions being reversed or re-visited which result in increased frustrations. It has also become a standard practice to roll-back failed changes, upgrades and patches, just to re-try the same updates after a "rework" has been done on them.

The root of the situation is the ability of IT staff to perform an accurate and successful incident investigation and problem analysis. Staff needs to have the ability to address an incident quickly, accurately and permanently. The typical fall-out of a poor incident investigation is the time and money spent doing trial and error fixes, re-doing investigations, revisiting decisions and performing endless replications to get to the technical/root cause of the problem.
So, what do IT professionals need to reverse this situation? They need the confidence to know whenever they approach an incident or problem, that there is a proven methodology that will provide them with a consensus answer at the end of the exercise which rectifies the issue(s) with finality. The IT professional is trained to work in a structured environment so a structured approach for incident investigation will complement their existing technical skills significantly.
The ability to resolve every incident in such a way that it does not re-occur has a compound effect on system downtime and levels of rework.

Our process will have the following direct impact:

• The initial incident will be addressed in a quick and single effort, saving time and costs.
• Both the incident and the problem will be addressed at the source, which avoids any escalations.
• The root cause would be identified accurately, which avoids a re-occurrence of the incident.
• Staff morale, confidence in their own abilities and levels of frustration would be addressed positively.

Typical results achieved with a structured and comprehensive skilling of RCA training would achieve some or all of the following:

1. Improve service availability between 2% to 15%.
2. Reduce operational costs  by 5% to 20%.
3. Improve productivity levels by at least 50%.
4. Eliminate recurring incidents and roll-backs by at least 80%.

Click here to see how Thinking Dimensions' clients are benefiting from our IT Service Availability model.
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