Using Quality Improvement Tools
What: A process analysis tool that helps identify and prioritize points of failure within a process.
Why: Helps to identify potential failure points and prioritize them according to severity and likelihood of occurrence, so its useful when you have to narrow down multiple potential points of failure to address.
When: When examining a proposed or existing process that has multiple [potential] points where it can be derailed.
How:
Summary of Steps:
- Define system/process boundaries and scope of the effort
- Define the purpose of the system/process under examination
- Identify functions within the scope of the study
- Identify all possible ways in which each function could fail (failure modes)
- Identify the consequences of each failure mode to the system or process (failure mode effects)
- Estimate the severity (S) of each failure mode on a scale of 1 - 10
- Estimate the probability of each failure mode occurring (O), in ordinal terms on a scale of 1-10
- Identify process/system controls that might prevent each failure from happening, and estimate how likely these controls will detect (D) each failure
- Determine a risk priority number for each failure mode: S x O x D
- Determine actions to take based on this information
The American Society for Quality provides additional details on the process.
Additional explanatory materials are also offered by IHI. And here's a template.