Whether it’s a cybersecurity breach or an operational disruption, outages and system failures can have a substantial financial impact on your company.
According to a Global Server Hardware, Server OS Reliability Survey, a typical enterprise faces 15 unplanned outages each year, and 91% of these outages result in downtime costs exceeding $300,000 per hour.
System failures can have even more expensive consequences, especially if health and safety are involved. In 2023, the Titan submersible imploded in the Atlantic Ocean, killing five and resulting in a $50 million lawsuit against OceanGate.
Here’s where robust risk assessment processes come into play—helping you identify, evaluate, and mitigate potential risks before they lead to severe negative consequences.
We’ll look at one such framework here—the fault tree analysis. In a fault tree analysis, you start with the root cause (top event) and work your way back to find the smaller problems (basic events) that lead to it.
Check out the free fault tree analysis templates below and discover how they help you identify and manage critical risks, regardless of the complexity of your industry or system.Â
Free Fault Tree Analysis Templates
- What Are Fault Tree Analysis Templates?
- What Makes a Good Fault Tree Analysis Template?
- 7 Free Fault Tree Analysis Templates
- 1. ClickUp Fault Analysis Template
- 2. ClickUp Risk Management Template
- 3. ClickUp Risk Assessment Whiteboard Template
- 4. ClickUp Risk Analysis Whiteboard Template
- 5. ClickUp Cause and Effect Whiteboard Template
- 6. ClickUp Root Cause Analysis Template
- 7. Microsoft Powerpoint Fault Tree Analysis Template by Powerslides
- Identify and Address Potential Risks Faster with ClickUp
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Are Fault Tree Analysis Templates?
A fault tree analysis (FTA) template is a structured framework that enables safety and reliability engineers to visually represent a system’s failure modes and their contributing causes using a top-down, deductive logic technique.
While the specific structure and content of fault tree diagrams can vary depending on the complexity of the system being analyzed, here are some core elements:
- Defining the top-tier failure: This is the undesired event or failure mode you want to analyze. It’s the starting point of the fault tree
- First-level reasons: These are the immediate causes that can directly lead to the top-tier failure
- Second-level faults: These are the contributing factors that can cause the first-level reasons
- Third-level faults: These are the causes that can lead to the second-level faults
You can continue to add more fault levels as needed to capture the system’s complexity. The goal is to break down the top-tier system failure into its root causes.
The fault tree analysis template can help you understand potential failure modes and their contributing factors in your system.
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat Makes a Good Fault Tree Analysis Template?
The effectiveness of your risk assessment is directly tied to the quality of your FTA template. That’s why it’s crucial to choose a template that facilitates a smooth deductive analysis. Fault tree analysis diagrams should enable clear connections between potential faults and help you determine their underlying causes.
Here are some points to consider when picking one:
- Logical structure: The failure modes and their reasons should be arranged in a logical sequence in a fault tree diagram so you can easily see the causal relationships between components
- Flexibility: The fault tree template should be adaptable to different systems and levels of detail and complexity
- Traceability: It should provide a clear top-down tree for tracking failure modes back to the original root cause
- Risk prioritization: Look for fault tree templates that have built-in options to prioritize risks based on their likelihood and consequences
- Usability: Check if your template is self-explanatory so even those with limited experience in FTA can grasp the analysis
- Visually appealing: Look for a template with graphic and labeling options so you can get your message across easily
And finally, make sure to review your FTA template periodically to ensure it’s updated to reflect changes in the system or processes.
Summarize this article for me please7 Free Fault Tree Analysis Templates
Now for the fun part. We’ve curated a list of seven free FTA templates to help you diagnose risk in your systems and processes. Use them to protect your assets and comply with your industry’s safety and reliability requirements.Â
1. ClickUp Fault Analysis Template
ClickUp’s Fault Tree Analysis Template closely follows the official fault tree analysis framework. This makes it perfect for safety engineers, reliability experts, and designers who work with complex machines and systems.
Built on ClickUp’s Whiteboard, you get an infinite canvas to add as many levels as needed to your analysis. Plus, the Whiteboard’s diagramming and illustration options make it easy for anyone to create visually appealing and easy-to-decipher fault tree analyses.Â
The template has a fault tree analysis diagram that comes with six components:
- The system level failure (or the root cause) is denoted as a blue square
- First-level faults are orange squares in the diagram
- Second-level faults are yellow squares
- Third-level squares are grey squares
This template also comes with two types of connectors—a green triangle to denote OR and a green circle to denote AND. These color-coded shapes can link cause to effect and create a hierarchical fault tree analysis report.Â
💡Pro Tip: Add your mitigation measures as tasks to ClickUp Projects directly from the template—so you can ensure they’re implemented effectively.
2. ClickUp Risk Management Template
If you’re looking for a more action-oriented risk assessment template, then the ClickUp Risk Management Template is for you. Here, you approach risk management and fault tree analysis as you would any project—step by step and systematically.
The template comes in two parts:
- A risk management plan that describes how your organization assesses and mitigates risk, along with who’s involved
- A risk management project where you can add each risk as a task along with other details like:
- The risk level and impact
- The probability of it happening
- Areas of impact
- How to mitigate it
- The DRI (disaster risk index) to manage the risk
This straightforward nature of the template—coupled with its start-to-finish risk management components—makes it the perfect fit for startups and small teams that require a simple, streamlined template to assess and mitigate risk.
💡Pro Tip: Using this template, use the Board view and group risks by priority level to visualize their severity and focus on the high-impact risks first.Â
3. ClickUp Risk Assessment Whiteboard Template
Are you looking for a simple, visually appealing template for risk assessment? Then check out the ClickUp Risk Assessment Whiteboard Template.Â
Unlike the previous template, this is not a flowchart. Instead, it’s a combination of a grid and a graph that allows you to list your risks and categorize them based on the level of intensity and likelihood that it would happen.
This template is excellent for both identifying your risks and prioritizing them. Here’s how the template works:
- Start by creating a graph where the vertical axis points to the likeliness of a risk happening, and the horizontal axis denotes the intensity
- Then, use colored sticky notes to organize your risks inside the graph depending on their degree of intensity and how likely it is to happen
That’s all. Now, you have an easy system to prioritize risks—moving from very likely and severe risks to very unlikely and minor ones.
4. ClickUp Risk Analysis Whiteboard Template
The ClickUp Risk Analysis Whiteboard Template is another excellent option for small teams that want a whiteboard template for visual clarity.Â
Like the previous template, you can organize risks inside a graph, with the vertical axis denoting risk probability and the horizontal axis denoting risk severity. But here, the graph already has a color-coded background to indicate the degree of priority.
All you have to do is place your risks as sticky notes by gauging their severity and probability.
💡Pro Tip: For best results, use this template in combination with the ClickUp Fault Tree Analysis Template. In the former, you can track cause and effect, carry out a deductive analysis, and then use what you have learned to analyze the impact of risk when setting up this template.
5. ClickUp Cause and Effect Whiteboard Template
A modern twist on the traditional fault tree analysis framework, the ClickUp Cause and Effect Whiteboard Template provides a hierarchical framework for tracing effects back to their causes.
This template comes with two elements—shapes and connector lines. You add risk details to the shapes and use connectors to link cause to effect.Â
Unlike the traditional fault tree analysis, this template avoids the complexity of AND/OR conditions, focusing instead on a branching structure to explore the various components of a particular risk. This makes it ideal for abstract risks, where multiple potential causes and effects exist, but the underlying conditions are less concrete.
💡Pro Tip: For a more comprehensive view of each risk, embed a ClickUp Doc. This allows your team to access detailed information on risk impact and mitigation strategies, even if the diagram has limited in space.
6. ClickUp Root Cause Analysis Template
You often play whack-a-mole with your debugging or risk management efforts because the root cause is left unaddressed.
Here’s where the ClickUp Root Cause Analysis Template can help.
The template provides two perspectives: a prioritized list that groups risks based on severity and a complete list showing all discovered risks.
Here’s how this works—any time a risk pops up in your assessment, you don’t stop at that risk but use the ‘why’ question to analyze what caused that risk. Then, repeat the process to find out your second why, third why, and so on until you understand the root cause of the risk.
7. Microsoft Powerpoint Fault Tree Analysis Template by Powerslides
Many meetings revolve around slide decks. So, if you’re looking for a professional template to create a presentation for your fault tree diagram, the Microsoft PowerPoint Fault Tree Analysis Template by Powerslides is an excellent choice.
The template provides a range of customizable slides to help you present your fault tree analysis. It offers a sleek and professional design featuring a two-color scheme. Customize the slides to match your specific needs and easily apply the elements to other presentations.
This template is ideal for team leaders who conduct weekly sprints with development teams. It provides a structured framework for analyzing potential failures and identifying root causes.
However, consider using a more detailed fault tree template for the in-depth analysis. This ensures you have both a thorough report and an easy-to-understand presentation format.
Summarize this article for me pleaseIdentify and Address Potential Risks Faster with ClickUp
Risk assessment and mitigation is a serious endeavor, and having a failsafe system in place can help if there are multiple stakeholders or changes in your risk assessment committee.
That’s why it’s crucial to set up a fault tree analysis template or risk management process, document your strategy and findings, and set up streamlined collaboration channels to involve all stakeholders.
A flexible work management tool like ClickUp becomes invaluable here. It offers built-in tools for everything from internal communications and project tracking to whiteboarding and documentation management.Â
It also offers various free risk management templates to speed up work and encourage users to approach risk assessment differently.
Sign up to ClickUp for free and set up a failsafe, organization-wide risk management system.
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