Get to the root cause of a problem

When making changes within your council, it’s important to understand where challenges are and their causes. While enthusiasm for change can be motivating, quick decisions can lead to unsuitable solutions.

By understanding the problem and avoiding decisions based on assumptions, you reduce risks and can better meet users’ needs. This resource will help you identify its root cause and analyse its impact on your service users.

When to do a root cause analysis

You can complete a root cause analysis:

• anytime you identify simple or moderate problems within your services
• if you’re delivering a new project – doing this at the start can help set the direction and prioritise focus areas
• when you’re trying to engage your organisation on systemic challenges as it can demonstrate the impact of a problem to decision makers

How to get to the root cause of a problem

It’s best to do this activity in a group setting, such as a workshop. This way you can have a range of insights and agree on next steps.

Use the ‘5 whys’ framework: start with a problem, identify the people who experience it, and discuss why it happens until you reach the root cause.

For example, residents might be unable to get their single person discount after someone moves out of their home on the website. This may be because the reporting form doesn’t allow changes online. The root cause could be that the form is on a third-party system that requires the manual input of data. A problem statement could be:

‘As a single occupier, I’m paying too much council tax. The root cause may be the platform that hosts service forms is inflexible.’

Use the questions to prompt conversation and reflect on the problem. Repeat if you need to explore several problems.

Focus on the users

Consider the people experiencing the problems you’re trying to understand. They may be using or delivering your services. They are often called users. Focusing on users first will help identify how to meet their needs.

Gather evidence

Make sure you collect insight from users to understand their behaviours, thoughts, and needs. If you do this ahead of the workshop, it makes sure you can have discussions on the day based on real observations and not assumptions.

Try to understand:

• who your users are and what they’re trying to do​
• how they do it currently (for example, what services or platforms they use)​
• the problems or frustrations they experience​what they need to achieve their goal​

You can find out about your users through research. If you don’t have access to a researcher, you may be able to get information on your users by:

• looking at any feedback gathered through surveys and focus groups ​​
• listening to calls with users
• looking at existing website data or using search tools, such as Google Trends​​, to see what users are looking for
• in-person observations of frontline staff, such as customer services​​

Get the right people in the room

Avoid working in silos by inviting a mix of managers, service owners, and other teams that are familiar with the problems. Their expertise can help identify how the challenges manifest at different levels across the organisation. They can also share what plans they might already have in place to address them. This way you can work together on addressing common challenges.

If you’re not facilitating the workshop, choose a trusted and impartial colleague to do it. This could be a manager or someone from the service delivery team.

What you can do next

Once you have identified the root cause of a problem, you can think of a hypothesis that you want to test. Some of the challenges identified during the workshop may require long-term changes, which is fine. The workshop will help identify areas of improvement for the future.

You can start small and prioritise those hypotheses that you know are easier to test and implement.