Focus on Reliability

This article written by Jeff Shiver originally appeared in Plant Services in June 2022

Recently I was facilitating a leadership seminar with a group of maintenance and reliability leaders. Everyone had finally agreed that, to improve performance, there had to be change, because as Albert Einstein said “If you do the same things every day and expect different results then that’s the definition of insanity!’. This led us to a discussion around perhaps the most maligned and forgotten management tool available – Change Management. We had an interesting discussion that got a little heated when I suggested that Change was really easy – you simply stop doing one thing and start doing another. The group was a little puzzled as to why I would bring up the topic as being much maligned and then tell them it was easy. That was until I explained that the difficult part of Change Management is the transition of behaviours from the old way to the new way – getting the transition, and so the behaviours you want, is the challenge. I used a work order as an example of what I was saying – if the goal is to change from paper work orders to electronic work orders – the change is fairly simple – you stop using paper work orders! The transition may not be so easy – when you used paper work orders the tradespeople would give great feedback and suggestions on the work order and allowed for continuous improvement but after the change to electronic all you get is ‘complete’ on the bottom of the form. Is that the behavior that you wanted – if not – what went wrong? We talked about the many reasons why the transition didn’t turn out the way we wanted and suggested that things like aging workforce who didn’t have confidence on the computer, people not understanding the benefit of the new system or being part of the development of the new system might have come into play.

Organizations typically fall into one of three categories. Reactive, emerging proactive, and proactive. Then we have those organizations that were proactive but have fallen back into the reactive cycle of despair. The statistic of over 60% of all organizations being reactive in their maintenance processes probably doesn’t surprise many of you, especially if you live in that environment.

Although these exact words do not appear in Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice in Wonderland’ the conversation between The Cat and Alice captures the sentiment that you need to have a goal in mind if you are planning a journey. The actual words