Sainsburys Glitch

A computer glitch at Sainsburys prevents delivery of some home orders. Caused by a... "computer fault". I doubt very much it was the computers fault though! It's highly unlikely it just forgot and rather more likely the poor thing broke a leg (disk), was knocked out (power outage) or was simply told to do something stupid by a piece of wet-ware (either as an erroneous instruction or by design).

Whatever... Once you've fixed the immediate issue then:

1. Root-cause analysis.


2. Determine the cost of incident.


3. Estimate probability of it occurring again.


4. Identify options to avoid in the future.


5. Cost these options.


6. Weigh the cost v benefit to see if anything should be done about it.

And do it efficiently! Start with ballpark estimates and rules-of-thumb to see if the arguments have any merit before getting bogged down in the detail (but make these assumptions clear when you explain it to the boss!).