Root Cause Analysis (RCA) Report Template

• Version 1.0
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• File Size 61.54 KB
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• Create Date February 9, 2022
• Last Updated March 16, 2023

If you work or have worked in network operations and maintenance, this is a very common term “RCA” which stands for Root Cause Analysis. But how many of us are in the habit of providing our customers/clients/colleagues with the RCA whenever we resolve a major incident/fault that resulted in service downtime?

Many of us love to fix and move on without providing accountability of what went wrong? I have come to accept that operations and maintenance engineers hate writing reports and documentations, it’s a common trait but a bad one and in most cases works against us.

Did you know that RCA(s) reports not only benefit the customer/clients but also benefit the engineers that keep them? RCA is a quick reference point should the problem reoccur. RCA(s) also help us to take full ownership of network issues, meaning that we understand the fault and its impact, and makes us proactive in our job role by ensuring that we provide full account of the incident from when it occurred to when it’s fully resolved and what we have done to ensure no reoccurrences.

Here are some of the benefits for keeping a record of RCA reports in network operations and maintenance:

1. Helps us to document the time when the fault occurred, this is very important in case you need to refer back to this time.
2. Records the engineer who worked on the fault in case there is need for future reference.
3. Impact assessment. The RCA contains the details of which services/systems were affected by the fault and how long was the downtime?
4. Detailed account of what happened so we can be able to identify future similar faults.
5. Documentation of the steps taken to resolve the issue for future reference.
6. Makes us proactive by ensuring we take steps to prevent reoccurrences
7. RCA reports can be used as a knowledge transfer/share document where new or junior engineers refer to historical RCA documents to resolve current similar faults.

Now that you know the benefits of creating and sharing RCA with your clients/customers/colleagues, I have created a template to help you quickly generate RCA reports. It’s fully editable and you can tune it to fit your purpose.