Problem Solving Session at the TapRooT® Summit

I had an opportunity to sit in on the Oil Upstream/Downstream problem solving session at the Summit last Saturday morning. Facilitator Michele Lindsay kicked off the discussion by asking attendees the share their biggest improvement. Click below for a sample of some of the great responses! ~ Barbara

“The quality of our final reports were lacking and certain factors were not covered well. So our company developed a TapRooT® Quality Checklist that must be satisfied before a report is submitted. The checklist helps define that causal factors were ‘true’ causal factors by prompting the report writer to carefully evaluate the causal factors. Improvement was almost immediate after implementing the checklist.”

“All leadership at our company are trained to understand TapRooT®. All executives are trained so they know what to look for and ask questions — they started asking the *right* questions after training. This shows commitment!”

“If you are not self insured, invite an insurance company to come in. Insurance companies like to be proactive, and our company received around $22K in free services (including an ergonomist specialist) just for asking.”

“We were having trouble getting timely follow-up on incidents. Management improved this issue by requiring incident reporting via an electronic system. The morning after the incident is keyed into the system, it is decided whether or not there will be a follow-up, as well as who will follow-up. Since the system was implemented, more people are reporting incidents because they know they will get attention in a timely manner.”

“Our company decided that it was mandatory for engineering groups to go through TapRooT®. If we can remove hazards in the design phase, we can avoid incidents. There is more awareness now and we are looking at ergonomic issues more.”

“We have a common database for all events that is corporate wide all across the world so people can have access and learn from it.”

“We chart for success by challenging our team to describe what *would* have happened *if* we had performed successfully.”

“We developed an Excel spreadsheet to decide *when* to use TapRooT®. The spreadsheet has 8 questions to help us assign low, medium or high risk to the incident. This keeps our small staff from being overburdened with investigations for minor incidents. While every incident gets investigated, the rating determines whether or not TapRooT® is mandatory.”

“We are working on going from reactive to proactive. Our company wants to go from incident investigations to self-assessment by training a large core group of investigators so the workload will be spread out and we will be able to form a team quicker.”

“If you don’t do anything else, use the back of the tree!”