Greetings!
I recently spotted quality happening when no one was looking .....
One of the reasons I enjoy writing this article is to help attempt to define the concept of quality and identify its occurrences. Well, recently a random act of quality occurred in my very own home.
I had a potentially dangerous situation where a wire in my circuit breaker box at my house decided to barbecue itself. The result - a strange situation where some lights and appliances work, and some didn't. Not strange you say?? .... probably all on the same circuit?? .... just reset the breaker?? That's what I thought. Funny thing was, none of the circuits were thrown, and outages had occurred on more than one circuit.
It was rather late by the time I spotted the wire and realized this must be the issue, and I knew sleep was out of the question until I had an electrician give it the once-over. The electrician soon showed up, scoped out the situation and declared; 'Yup, it's the wire .... needs to be replaced'. Thankfully, it was a quick and easy fix ..... or so we thought.
He tested the wired first to determine that this was, in fact, the root cause of the problem. Having passed the test, he permanently replaced the wire - and wha-lah! .... The problem remained. The electrician then said; 'I just tested the fix, it should have worked'.
You probably now see where I'm heading with this story ...
It was late, the electrician had already worked a full day and was tired, and he was messing around with a boat load of live wires .....what could go wrong. To pleasant surprise, the electrician did the following :
1. He kept his cool. Very understated quality value when determining root cause. Doing so helps you think more clearly, and in my electrician's case, kept him from getting injured.
2. He logically started asking 'why' questions to help him track the flow of this issue to ultimately find its source. For each question, he attempted to prove or dis-prove it before moving on to the next - thereby building an objective analysis of the outage. In reality, be was building a decision tree to the root cause based on outcomes of his why questions.
3. He tracked his decision tree to ensure he didn't repeat the same steps again. Great idea given both he and I wanted to call it a day.
End result, he was unhurt (real nice to see), and solved a problem that looked like it could have taken hours to resolve (without ranting and and cursing) in 45 minutes. It turns out it was a circuit breaker that sometimes worked, and sometimes didn't.
I went to sleep that night comfortable in the knowledge that I wouldn't have dreams of my house not going up in flames, and having just witnessed a simple yet effective method of RCA and correction is action.
Kudos to my electrician for the quality refresher course!
Next article: Methods to The Madness
