The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Maintenance Organizations - HABIT 3

Habit 3 – Put First Things First

This is the habit of personal management. But, it applies to organizations as well. It is about organizing and implementing activities in line with the aims established in habit 2. If habit 2 is the first, or mental creation of a vision, then habit 3 is the second, or physical creation of that vision via the creation of, and adherence to, an organized implementation plan. Having a documented plan allows important activities (urgent or not) to never be at the mercy of the unimportant activities (urgent or not).

The steps of a successful maintenance organization’s implementation plan are often determined through the assessment of their reliability practices by an outside set of eyes. The improvement steps resulting from these assessments include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

Business Processes:

• Instituting a cultural change management program
  
• Developing key performance indicators (KPIs)
  
• Developing workflows for all key processes

Foundational Elements:

• Verifying/scrubbing of the Master Equipment List (MEL)
  
• Criticality ranking of equipment

Inventory Strategy:

• Standardization of inventory content/taxonomy
  
• BOM development
  
• Storeroom design & kitting integration
  
• Stock optimization

Reliability:

• Determination of PdM baseline
  
• Performance of RCM and FMEA on applicable systems and equipment
  
• Root Cause Failure Analysis (RCMA)
  
• Application of appropriate PdM
  
• PM development and/or optimization

Training:

• Skills needs analysis
  
• Skills assessments
  
• Training Plan & Schedule

Steps are included to ensure the plans are tracked, measured, adjusted if necessary, and adhered to.

Focus efforts where they count: In Dr. Covey’s words, “Is your ladder against the right wall?” I’ve often asked maintenance organizations, “If two pieces of equipment go down at the same time and you only have one crew to repair them, which one do you send the crew to first? Some of the answers are amazing. There should be no hesitation. Crews should be assigned according to equipment criticality and job priority. Following the seven habits should eliminate this dilemma because in Habit 2 such rules are constructed with input from the appropriate parties.

Using Dr. Covey’s time management matrix, reproduced below, allows us to identify where our time is being spent:



Quadrant I is where reactive organizations spend most of their time.
Emergency breakdowns and firefighting take place in Quadrant I. These are things that are usually both important and urgent.

Quadrant II is where activities that are important but not urgent take place. These are the things that keep us out of Quadrant I.

In our personal life, these are activities such as exercising, eating right, and going for medical and dental checkups. Maintenance-related Quadrant II activities are things such as equipment inspections, quantitative PMs, implementing and using predictive methodologies, creation of and training to workflows, and entering CMMS foundational data including scrubbed materials lists, BOMs, master equipment lists, critically rankings, proper equipment hierarchies, job plans, and equipment history.

By living in Quadrant II, we proactively head off the causes that have us work in Quadrant I. Remember, Quadrant I activities are more expensive because they are unplanned activities, and unplanned activities are always more expensive than planned activities.