Correction of Error (COE)

Correction of Error is a process for improving quality by documenting and addressing issues. You will want to define a standardized way to document critical root causes, and ensure they are reviewed and addressed.

Overview

Applying a COE process helps you ensure your team understands root causes, that they have been reviewed in a consistent way, and have been addressed correctly.

Structure of a COE

A well-structured COE should answer the following questions:

1. What happened?
2. What was the impact on customers and your business?
3. What was the root cause?
4. What data do you have to support this?
   • Provide metrics and graphs.
5. What were the critical pillar implications, especially security?
   • When architecting workloads you make trade-offs between pillars based upon your business context. These business decisions can drive your engineering priorities.
   • You might optimize to reduce cost at the expense of reliability in development environments, or, for mission-critical solutions, you might optimize reliability with increased costs.
6. What lessons did you learn?
7. What corrective actions are you taking?
   • Action items
   • Related items (trouble tickets, etc.)

Review Process

You should have your COE reviewed by your team, as well as other teams.

• High impact COEs: Should be reviewed during your operational meetings.
• The Wheel: Use the iterative nature of the COE process to continuously improve.

Read more about COEs and their origin here.