When it comes to the weekly Maintenance Scheduling meeting, I generally see two separate spectrums. The first is no meeting or no attendees, and ultimately, no real schedule. On the opposite end, I see the long drawn out review of the entire backlog, most of which we don’t have materials for or resources to do in the current week. That might be OK if you have very little backlog. Most don’t. I believe you would agree that we spend way too much time in meetings reviewing the same items week after week.
For effective scheduling meetings there are three primary components which are process, partnerships, and discipline. From a process perspective, the Planner Schedulers working together in advance to draft the schedule, email it early in the week to the other partners, and coordinate priorities prior to the weekly scheduling meeting. To be effective, there must be a partnership among the stakeholders to provide timely responses to changes to the draft before the meeting. The Planner Schedulers should run the scheduling meeting and use an agenda to keep everyone focused. The discipline comes in sticking to the process and everyone enforcing the mutual partnership.
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From a timing perspective, I believe you can strive for the first 15 minutes of the meeting being utilized to confirm the prioritized work schedule for next week. There should only be one schedule, not one for each craft. Follow that with 15 minutes to share last week’s metrics and to discuss any schedule breaks. Work to limit the weekly scheduling meeting to 30 minutes in total.
Is this an achievable goal in your organization? What do you see as barriers?
Cheers,
Jeff