Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

What is an RCA?

A Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a structured investigation that identifies the underlying cause of an issue, as well as contributing factors.

Our Goal is to restore the affected service rapidly, understand what happened, why it happened and what we're doing to prevent it from happening again.

Scheer IMC's RCA process ensures a structured and timely response to Priority 1 (P1) outages, which are all recorded and tracked via a corresponding Jira Service Desk Ticket.

General Information

For every System Outage (Priority 1 incident) of the production system an internal RCA ticket is automatically created.

The technical investigation is lead by our Hosting Department, which performs a basic investigation and restores the affected services.

Depending of the nature of the issue, to successfully complete an RCA, the Hosting Department might also need to involve other stakeholders: Support, Incident Manager, Development, Architecture and even external resources (like Microsoft).

The Service Desk Team follows up on the progress, manages the communication and delivers the final RCA summary to the customer.

Update of the RCA Ticket

The RCA ticket is updated with:

Timeline: A clear sequence of events from incident start to resolution
Root cause and contributing factors: The main issue and any related contributing elements
Actions taken: Immediate actions that were taken to resolve the incident
Preventive measures: Long-term improvements and measures taken to prevent recurrence

⏱️ Timeline and Process Flow

Resolution & Communication:

1 business day

Once the initial issue/outage was solved, the Service Desk Ticket will be set to Resolved
The Service Desk Team will inform the customer about the creation of the RCA Ticket and follow up on the RCA progress with the appropriate stakeholders
Desk Status will be set to “RCA in Progress“

Completion of the RCA:

5 business days
For complex cases, or if the involvement of external resources is needed, the completion might be extended to a longer period

If the root cause was a Non-Software Defect
- the Service Desk Team will adjust the ticket type
- deliver the final RCA summary to the customer, within the initial Desk Ticket
- set the Ticket Status back to “Resolved“

If the root cause identified was a Software Defect
- the Service Desk Team will inform the customer about that
- set the Ticket Status back to “Resolved“
- open a separate Desk Ticket
- link the internal BUG ticket to it
- inform the customer about the progress (a fix will be provided within the agreed SLAs)

Systems Hosted in-house (on-premise)

For systems which are hosted in-house (on-premise), our Technical Services Team can assist in analysing outages. This type of request will be handled as a Consulting Request. For troubleshooting, please follow the guidance under section Supporting Troubleshooting.

Our Commitment

Every RCA reflects our commitment to reliability, transparency, and continuous service improvement. We’re dedicated to finding answers and making meaningful changes.