FMEA - A six sigma methodology to find flaws in your flow before ever running it 🔍

I continue to find that many are reinventing the wheel with AI workflows. There are many tools and methods that have been around for decades and in some cases over a century for traditional manufacturing that map cleanly to this new era.

One of these I keep mentioning is FMEA or failure mode and effects analysis. FMEA is a risk management methodology that allows you to review your designs and processes prior to implementing them.

The process is as follows:

List out the sequential steps of your process, design or workflow
List the potential failures modes one by one at each process step. What can go wrong and how
List the potential causes that could result in that failure
Rate the severity (how bad is it if the failure occurs), occurrence (how often does the failure happen or is likely to happen), and detection (how good is your ability to detect that failure when it occurs or before it occurs). A score combining the three is calculated

What this does it assign a numerical value to each risk to prioritize attacking them in order of most to least importance. You can fix any gaps and reevaluate the new workflow. All of this is done before shipping anything. If you make a change to the workflow, adjust the FMEA and make sure there are no gaps.

I’ve included an image of what one of these typically looks like. Try it out on your workflows. Do you see any gaps? Any failures you didn’t think of before or something that you can build a feature to catch? Let me know what you think below ⬇️

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