There are 15 potential Pre-Summit Courses to choose from in June and five of the courses are new. That’s probably why so many people are asking which course would be best for them. Therefore, I thought I’d share my thoughts to help people make the best choice.
First, the 15 Courses are:
2-Day TapRooT® Incident Investigation & Root Cause Analysis Course
Special 2-Day Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis
Advanced Causal Factor Development Course
Advanced Trending Techniques
TapRooT® Analyzing and Fixing Safety Culture Issues
Risk Assessment and Management Best Practices
TapRooT® Quality/Six Sigma/Lean Advanced Root Cause Analysis Training
Getting the Most from Your TapRooT® Software
Hazard Recognition
Proactive Use of TapRooT®
NEW Interviewing & Investigation Basics
NEW Combating Fatigue
NEW Understanding and Stopping Human Error
NEW Root Cause Analysis for Sentinel Events & Healthcare Quality Improvement
NEW Creative Corrective Actions
First, let me say that I like all these courses. I’ve hand-picked them to be included before the Summit because I think they will help you solve some of your biggest problems. But I understand that you can only attend one of these courses and that you want to pick the best one, so I’ll offer some advice.
If you haven’t attended a TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis Course before, then you should consider attending the 2-Day TapRooT® Incident Investigation and Root Cause Analysis Course. This is the basic/starter TapRooT® Course that all investigators/root cause analysts should take. It will make the Summit much more valuable if you understand how the TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis System works. And it will help you perform much better investigations of safety, quality, and production issues. This course (like all Pre-Summit Courses) is completely guaranteed. We know that you and your management will agree that you will find root causes that you previously would have missed and develop much more effective corrective actions.
Need to improve equipment reliability and apply advanced equipment troubleshooting techniques? Then the Special 2-Day Equifactor® Equipment Troubleshooting and Root Cause Analysis Course is for you. You will learn to apply Heinz Bloch’s advanced troubleshooting techniques to understand how equipment failures occurred. You will then learn to take that information, organize it in a SnapCharT®, identify the Causal Factors, and find each Causal Factors root causes using the TapRooT® Root Cause Tree®. Even equipment troubleshooting experts that have attended this course have commented on the helpfulness of the Heinz Bloch troubleshooting tables and the TapRooT® Root Cause Analysis System.
Want to improve your TapRoot® Skills, especially your ability to identify Causal Factors? Then the Advanced Causal Factor Development Course is for you. Ken Turnbull teaches this course using recent examples of accidents, incidents, and near-misses – some straight from the press. You will get lot’s of hands-on exercise practice and instructor feedback.
Do you need to learn to trend your safety and performance data? Especially data from infrequently occurring accident statistics? Would you like to prove that you have improved performance? Or do you need to mathematically demonstrate that a “trend” really isn’t a trend, but rather, is just normal process variation? That’s what the Advanced Trending Techniques Course is all about. I developed after I saw a client’s advanced trending best practices that blew me away. This was trending that really worked and showed when a trend was real and when it was just normal process variation. It was based on advanced lean/six sigma techniques that were specially modified for low frequency accident data. But the same techniques can be applied to all your data. It truly is a one size fits all trending program that will help your management focus their improvement initiative. In the course you will learn how to draw advanced graphs and practice your skills so that you can apply the techniques to your data back home. The course is taught by Kevin McManus, a quality/safety guru, and I know that you will find it enlightening and very useful.
The topic of Safety Culture is a hot button in the nuclear, oil, and aviation industry. If you would like to analyze and improve your safety culture, then the TapRooT® Analyzing and Fixing Safety Culture Issues Course is for you. Brian Tink and Brian Tink (Jr & Sr) will show you how to use TapRooT® Tools along with culture analysis tools to analyze and fix safety culture issues. Part of this course is a practice safety culture analysis for your company. If safety culture is a hot button topic at your company, don’t miss this course.
Interested in risk assessment and management? Want to learn about the latest international standards and how they can help keep your management out of trouble? Then you need to listen to risk management guru Jim Whiting in his course: Risk Assessment and Management Best Practices. Jim shares all the latest risk management techniques and tons of documentation that you will use when you return to work
Interested in applying advanced root cause analysis techniques in a Lean, Six Sigma, or Quality program? Then attend the TapRooT® Quality/Six Sigma/Lean Advanced Root Cause Analysis Training taught by Chris Vallee. Chris is a Six Sigma Black Belt. He will show you how to use TapRooT® Techniques to analyze and fix quality problems, lean waste issues, and problems discovered using Six Sigma techniques.
Do you provide technical support for the TapRooT® Software? Are you a TapRooT® Software “Power Users” who wants to learn the latest tricks and see the latest software updates? Are you interested in the changes coming in Version 6 of the TapRooT® Software. Are you responsible for setting up the TapRoot® Software and preparing the trending fields and linking the software to other databases? Then you want to attend the Getting the Most from Your TapRooT® Software Course taught by Dan VerLinde, VP for Software Development at SI. You will be amazed how much you learn and how much better your software usage will be.
What is a hazard? Do you see them before they can cause an accident? If you are interested in Hazard recognition and elimination, then the Hazard Recognition Course is for you. Peter Berkholtz, a TapRoot® Instructor from Australia with 25 years of mining and industrial experience, will teach this practical course. Don’t let hazards sneak up on you. Recognize and eliminate them!
Did you know you could use the TapRooT® System to solve problems before they cause a crisis? If you want to stop problems BEFORE they happen, then the Proactive Use of TapRooT® Course is for you! Dave Janney developed this course after realizing that people would rather stop fatalities before they happen rather than investigate fatalities after they happen. He explains how TapRooT® can be applied to improve auditing, observations and BBS, and pre-job hazard assessments. Learn new ways to apply the TapRoot® System to proactively improve performance at your facility.
And now for the new courses …
Interviewing and Investigation Basics: We’ve taught this course before but after we had so many positive comments about Barbara Phillips talk on Body language and interviewing at last year’s TapRooT® Summit, we decided to completely revise the course adding new material on interviewing, I think you will find this course to be engaging, useful, practical, and a good use of your time if you are interested in effective interview techniques and the tools and practices needed to collect information for an effective root cause analysis.
Combating Fatigue: fatigue in the workplace (and while driving) is one of the most frequent, and least investigated, causes of accidents. Studies of actual auto accidents that were video tapped inside the car for later analysis showed that actual fatigue and sleeping was often NEVER reported but was the cause of the accident. What can you do to fight fatigue at your company? Get great ideas from fatigue expert Bill Sirois. Learn to understand the risks of fatigue. Learn the five levels of defense against fatigue. Learn to build and improve a Fatigue Risk Management System (required in several industries). Understand specific methods to handle fatigue in high hazard industries. This course has been completely updated since it was last given before the 2012 Summit and we see it as completely new.
Understanding and Stopping Human Error: Mark Paradies, President of System Improvements and Joel Haight, Professor of Industrial Engineering at the University of Pittsburg, will bring their considerable knowledge of the practical application of human factors engineering to this newly developed course. The course will cover the human abilities and limitations that lead to human error, how to understand error likely situations and error causing designs, and how to apply error reducing techniques that work and to understand why some error reducing techniques that are frequently suggested are of little practical value. If you are interested in human performance and stopping human error (or at least reducing it as far as practical), then don’t miss this course.
Root Cause Analysis for Sentinel Events & Healthcare Quality Improvement: Ed Skompski, Vice President at System Improvements, has created a 2-Day TapRooT® Course especially for the healthcare community that focuses on the analysis of the root causes of sentinell events and healthcare quality issues. The course is built around real clinical events and uses the TapRooT® System, a recognized good practice in the healthcare industry and that the terminology is recognized by The Joint Commission.
Creative Corrective Actions: You may remember this course from the past. Michele Lindsay was a TapRooT® Instructor for over a decade. But she now is a performance improvement coach at a healthcare facility. But this year she will be coming back to the TapRooT® Summit and is presenting a new course on creative corrective actions using Dr. Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats™ techniques.
That’s a lot of training to choose from! But don’t wait too long to register. Seats are limited in these courses and we want you to get your first choice!
Additionally, you get a $200 discount on the training when you also attend the 2015 Global TapRooT® Summit. For more Summit info, see:
http://www.taproot.com/taproot-summit
And if you have any questions about the Pre-Summit Courses or the Summit, please call us at 865-539-2139. Or CLICK HERE to drop us a note with your question.