Finding the Right Fault is Key to Superior Incident Investigation

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How often do you have incidents that take far too long to resolve or restore service? Do your Incident Statements have fault wording like Slow, Degraded, Poor performance, etc. If this is the case, then this vague wording is a primary reason why! Wording like this should be banned from incident statements.

The incident statement is the foundation of everything that is about to unfold in the incident investigation. If this step is not accurate or too vague, then the incident is very likely to become long and drawn out.

Always ask yourself, “How many possible causes could there be for this incident statement?” If the answer is many or hundreds, then your statement is too vague. This will lead to unnecessary changes being backed out, which may cause other incidents and drastically extended timeframes and wasted resource utilisation.

You need a specific questioning drill to get the foundation statement right and specific from the beginning, so the information/facts that you gather are relevant and concise. This will help to ensure that they inspire the correct intuition from the investigation team.

Investigation teams need to be more specific when they are given vague Fault information like ‘slow’ or ‘degraded’ or ‘not working’.

They need to ask:

• What is slow?
• What do you mean by slow? Time slow? Data throughput slow? Transmission speed slow? WHAT IS SLOW?
• What do you mean by Not Working?

You can see by this questioning that people can be much more specific and this then leads to a more specific object that is experiencing the fault. Often the team does not have the information to be more specific. THIS IS A GOOD THING as the team will be finding out new specific information about their incident and this could lead to immediate resolution.

When you have the correct or the most specific FAULT, then you will always be able to find the correct Object that is experiencing that fault! 

This simple step will improve incident investigations by up to 50%!!

Andrew Sauter, Thinking Dimensions Global

Useful Links:

Training – Root Cause Analysis for IT Professionals

Webinar – itRCA – An Intuitive Process to Identify, Investigate and Fix Incidents