3. What approach can be used to make a process more reliable?

There is no magic formula for identifying the factors and causes contributing to process unreliability. It's all part of the problem-solving process.

• Gather information and study the history of incidents and other anomalies that have had a negative impact on quality, capacity, costs and deadlines. Represent the frequencies by type of incident and anomaly, for example with a Pareto chart.

• Identify the root causes of the most frequent incidents and anomalies, using the cause tree method and the five whys, for example.

• Assess the business case for working on root causes and defining actions to eliminate them.

• For a new process, it is more difficult to anticipate the costs associated with a future lack of reliability, and therefore to estimate...