David Caulfield

CAPA System that Protected €15 Million

Problem Statement

Recurring bugs were drowning engineering teams in reactive patch fixing. Across 6 teams (~60 engineers), the same categories of bugs kept reappearing because teams fixed symptoms instead of root causes.

Business Impact

  • €15 million in annual recurring revenue at risk: Clients refused new software or bug fixes due to reliability issues and downtime risks.
  • 120% capacity on bug fixes: One team spent nights and weekends for months on end reacting to new bugs.
  • Features delayed: Critical bugs overloaded teams, leading to delayed releases.

My Approach

  • Diagnosis: Teams patched individual bugs without addressing root causes, leading to constant firefighting. No governance existed to ensure preventative actions were implemented.
  • What I Built: A CAPA (Corrective Action, Preventative Action) system for software, rolled out across 60 engineers.

The Framework

For every critical bug or incident:

  1. Incident assessment
  2. Root cause description
  3. Corrective action (immediate fix)
  4. Preventative action (Systemic change to prevent this class of failure)
  5. Identify plan, owner & deadline to complete actions

Governance

  • Monthly governance review
  • Participants: Scrum Masters, Tech Leads, Management
  • Agenda: Prioritise preventative actions, unblock resources, track completion

Adoption Strategy

  • Prioritised quick wins. Engineers saw benefits of process quickly.
  • Broke down big ideas into manageable pieces.
  • Negotiated scope when teams pushed back.
  • Management actively unblocked dependencies.
  • Preventative work was made visible and tracked in monthly review.
  • Within 12 months, started to include external teams.

Impact

  • Revenue recovery: Moved at-risk €15 million ARR to retained.
  • Productivity recovery: €2 million annual cost savings from recovered engineering capacity (reclaimed 400 hours per week from one team).
  • Quality: 90% reduction in recurring critical bugs across 6 teams. CAPA framework became standard practice.

Applying this to other domains

CAPA (Corrective action, preventative action) is a standard procedure amongst any high-stakes or regulated domain:

  • FSA (Fault slippage analysis): Tech
  • CAPA (Corrective Action, Preventative Action): Medical device industry
  • SMS (Safety management system): Aviation
  • Incident analysis: Emergency services
  • PSIMS (Patient safety incident managemente system): Healthcare, hospitals

0 kudos