Identify the Root Cause for Hypotheses Proven True

After you determine a Hypothesis to be true and change its state accordingly, you can continue testing the hypothesis through RCA Verifications to identify the root cause of the Failure Event.

If a Hypothesis is proven correct, the RCA Team should continue testing all the other Hypotheses before testing further to determine the root cause. For example, the team may find that Hypothesis-A is true and that the cause was physical. If the root cause analysis is prematurely ended here because the solution seems evident, the team may fail to consider other causes. If other causes are not identified as possibilities, no additional action will occur and the failure event is likely to occur again.

This topic describes how to identify the Root cause for a Hypothesis that is proven true.

Steps

Access the Logic Tree diagram in which you want to specify the root cause for a Hypothesis.
In the design canvas, select the Hypothesis for which you want to specify the root cause, and then select .

The Properties window appears, displaying the datasheet for the selected node.

Hint: You can also change the state of a Hypothesis from the States panel. To do so, select the Hypothesis, and then select .
In the State list, select one of the following:
- Cause - Physical
- Cause - Human
- Cause - Latent
Select .

Your changes are saved.

Results

After you select a cause:

A red line is drawn to show the path to failure.
The icon used to identify the Hypothesis node changes to indicate the specific cause.
The team can communicate their findings to the decision makers in your organization.