Entries by Nathan Ives

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 15 – Condition Report Review Meetings

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Effective corrective action programs promptly and consistently screen newly reported issues for their impact on the organization’s vision, mission, values, and goals. These screenings prioritize and aggregate corrective actions from all business areas with the organization’s strategic initiatives and day-to-day operations; ensuring optimal resource use. Consequently, condition report review meetings are frequently used to review and prioritize newly submitted condition reports.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 14 – Establish Time Limits for Causal Analyses

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Determining the amount of time required for performing causal analyses is a balancing act. The depth of issue investigation should align with its significance. Consequently, more significant events require additional time to perform the more detailed causal analysis assigned to them. Countering this is the urgency to understand and correct the underlying causes of more significant events as well as to put into place those barriers that will prevent their recurrence. Thus, it is important to establish time limits for causal analysis performance that effectively balance these two opposing needs.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 13 – Formally Defined Reporting Criteria

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Effective corrective action programs support achievement of the organization’s vision, mission, values, and goals. Consequently, adverse conditions and trends as well as performance improvement opportunities entered into the program must be aligned with these stated outcomes lest the program’s resource be diverted to non-value adding issues and its effectiveness be diminished. Formally defining corrective action program reporting criteria helps ensure the desired alignment is achieved and program effectiveness maximized.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 12 – Formally Defined Corrective Action Program

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Effective corrective action programs engage employees in the identification, documentation, evaluation, prioritization, and resolution of organizational challenges thereby enhancing achievement the organization’s vision, mission, values, and goals. These programs themselves are highly efficient and capable of producing repeatable results. Documenting corrective action program processes provides the framework necessary to achieve this level of focused execution consistency.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 11 – Check for Duplicate Condition Reports

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Leaders valuing continuous performance improvement encourage employee engagement in the corrective action program as a primary input to organizational learning and growth. Combined with a low reporting threshold, these organizations process numerous condition reports every day, some of which will be duplicative when an adverse condition is observed and reported by more than one person.

Each condition report filed requires the expenditure of resources to investigate, prioritize, and resolve. Duplicative condition reports result in the expenditure of resources with no organizational value added. To ensure this does not occur, checks for duplicate condition reports should be performed as early in the process as possible and, when found, duplicate condition reports should be eliminated.