How to identify and prioritise single points of failure

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Before you can prioritise problems at your club, you first need to understand if there are any single points of failure. These are jobs or tasks that can only be carried out by one specific person.

An example of this is having only one person trained to carry out health and safety checks. This is a vital job as without these checks, you could be at risk of accidents and legal action. However, if the trained person has time off or leaves, who will step in to carry out this task?

As the impact of this task not being carried out could be canada rcs data devastating to your club, this point of failure would be the highest priority.

How to recognise weaknesses and opportunities
Once you have identified all the points of failure and prioritised them based on impact, it can be helpful to conduct a SWOT analysis. This highlights strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

To show how this is done, we’ll use the following scenario…

John works for a gymnastics club where he is in charge of the timesheets. He has created a process to manage this. John is only able to work at the club two times a week, and no one else has been trained to replace John.

SWOT Analysis
Strength – John is a knowledgeable employee and has created a process to follow

Weakness – John only comes in twice a week because he works elsewhere during the day and that’s all the time he can give

Opportunity – John is calm and methodical so could train other employees to implement the process

Threat – if John leaves, no-one knows how to manage the timesheets. This could lead to unhappy coaches, potentially resulting in lost revenue

As you can see from the example, this straightforward analysis method makes it simple to see what the problems are, and prompts you to start thinking about solutions. In this case, a next step could be to use John’s knowledge to train other employees, either directly or by developing creating documentation.