Rough Root Causes

An event may call for a routine investigation because the risk index was low and no other selection factor indicated an expanded investigation.

However, root causes may be assigned for a routine event if the QA SysOp has a thorough knowledge of both the organizational system and the root cause process.

Because these root causes are not obtained by conducting a rigorous root cause analysis, they are considered "rough" root causes.

Linked Root Causes

If an event is very similar to an event for which a complete root cause analysis has been done in the past, the same root causes may be associated with the more recent event.

In this case, the root causes are considered to be linked.