Praxis II: Friend-Safe Gate and Wristband System at Friends Daycare

Root Cause Analysis - Framing

Root cause analysis allowed us to adjust our need statement to better reflect our team position during the reframing of our opportunity. After reading the RFP, it seemed like the main opportunity from the RFP centered around reducing staff supervision burden. It placed staff members as primary stakeholders, and the children as secondary stakeholders. We decided to do some root-cause analysis to get a better sense of the different factors involved in this opportunity. This root cause analysis is shown below.

This led us to realize that nearly all the causes of staff supervision burden were caused by the risk of children escaping the daycare. This then gave us an opportunity to incorporate our team position into the framing. Our team values included joy and safety, and we found that reducing the risk of children escaping the daycare was an essential part of ensuring the the joy and safety of the children. For these reasons, we changed the need statement from "reduce staff supervision by implementing a reliable gate system, allowing day care staff to focus

on child engagement rather than monitoring gate closure" (from original RFP C) to "[n]eed a convenient and safe system to prevent the egress of children from daycare premises during transition and play times."

Thus, the root-cause analysis allowed us to lay out and visualize the various contributing factors to the opportunity, and identify the ones that were the most prevalent/significant and relevant to our team values. This thereby allowed us to reprioritize an important stakeholder group (the children) and better enact our team position when reframing the opportunity.