Establishing the root cause

When performing a root cause analysis, you try to establish the problem's root cause. Even if the problem investigation was triggered proactively by your organization's capacity management system, you must determine why the service infrastructure is running out of capacity.

After you determine the root cause, take the following steps:

• Record the root cause
• If the root cause resides within a CI, relate the CI to the problem investigation. For information about how to do this, see Relating-incident-requests-and-problem-investigations.
• Look at the Workaround field to review any previously proposed workarounds. With the root cause now known, if necessary, propose a better workaround and describe how to implement it. For information about how to do this, see Proposing-a-temporary-workaround.

If you cannot determine the root cause, you must record this also in a work information note on the Work Detail tab. Ensure that you record why a root cause cannot be found, and be sure to record the activities that you performed to determine that a root cause cannot be determined.

If the root cause analysis is temporarily unable to progress (for example, if you are waiting for information from a supplier), make sure you set the problem investigation's Status field to Pending, and then specify why in a work information note on the Work Detail tab. See Creating-work-information-entries for information about how to do this.