Habit 4 – Think Win-Win
Dr. Covey calls this the habit of interpersonal leadership, necessary because achievements are largely dependent on cooperative efforts with others. He says that win-win is based on the assumption that there is plenty for everyone, and that success follows a cooperative approach more naturally than the confrontation of win/lose situations.
When a successful organization finds a solution to a situation they always ask, “How is this going to affect the processes before and after this one?” If it’s going to help one area but hurt another, then in the long run it’s not going to work. All solutions have to help ALL the parties concerned. Some groups to consider: finance, purchasing, operations, marketing, human resources, employees, stockholders, the neighboring community, even the local business owner down the street.
We’re all on the same team.
An example of a win/win can be found in organizations that practice full integration between maintenance and operations. Communicating with operations to schedule planned maintenance activities within a reasonable timeframe allows both parties to better utilize their resources and adhere to their schedules.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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:
Foundational Elements:
Inventory Strategy:
Reliability:
Training:
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Maintenance Organizations - HABIT 2
Habit 2 – “Begin with the End in Mind”
This is the habit of leadership—both personal and organizational—and leading yourself and the organization toward your goals. Dr. Covey professes that everything is created twice—once in the mental realm and then a second time in the physical realm. By first developing a clear mental vision of our desired results, we will be able to create the necessary steps to achieve that vision. Habit two is all about creating that vision.
Effective maintenance organizations have taken the time to create strategy plans for various aspects of their organizations. Here are some of those areas and questions that should be asked:
Maintenance Strategy: Does a run-to-failure or a reactive strategy make sense to your organization? Do you want your jobs planned and scheduled in advance? Who in your organization should decide which equipment gets repaired first? What should the decision be based on—criticality of the equipment and job priority or the squeaky wheel supervisor?
Reliability Strategy: Are you going to use predictive methodologies on all of your equipment to which it applies? Or, are you going to apply it only to certain systems? Will you use on-line monitoring, or route-based monitoring? Are quantitative PMs being utilized now, and if not, do you plan on applying the resources to scrub your PMs and make them better? Do you use/will you use reliability engineers?
Material Strategy: Will you have a lean storeroom, or a storeroom that never suffers stock outs? Will you enter bill-of-material (BOM) data into your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) ahead of time or as you make entries for specifically used equipment? Who’ll enter that data? What about kitting or vendor managed inventories (VMI)?
Employee Strategy: Have you identified the skills your employees need to perform their jobs? Do you know which employees have those skills and which don’t? Are you going to hire for new skills, use contractors, or train your existing employees in the new skills they need?
It’s obvious that having the answers to these questions in advance can head off major future issues.
When You Begin with the End in Mind—an end that entails an efficient and effective maintenance organization, that utilizes its CMMS to the fullest, that plans and schedules jobs in advance, and engineers the root cause of failures out of their equipment—you will see the earliest rewards for your efforts and investments. Keep in mind, those rewards are not only financial as shown here, but are also quality-of-life issues, i.e., no more calls in the middle of the night on a weekend. A well run Maintenance department should be boring.
This is the habit of leadership—both personal and organizational—and leading yourself and the organization toward your goals. Dr. Covey professes that everything is created twice—once in the mental realm and then a second time in the physical realm. By first developing a clear mental vision of our desired results, we will be able to create the necessary steps to achieve that vision. Habit two is all about creating that vision.
Effective maintenance organizations have taken the time to create strategy plans for various aspects of their organizations. Here are some of those areas and questions that should be asked:
Maintenance Strategy: Does a run-to-failure or a reactive strategy make sense to your organization? Do you want your jobs planned and scheduled in advance? Who in your organization should decide which equipment gets repaired first? What should the decision be based on—criticality of the equipment and job priority or the squeaky wheel supervisor?
Reliability Strategy: Are you going to use predictive methodologies on all of your equipment to which it applies? Or, are you going to apply it only to certain systems? Will you use on-line monitoring, or route-based monitoring? Are quantitative PMs being utilized now, and if not, do you plan on applying the resources to scrub your PMs and make them better? Do you use/will you use reliability engineers?
Material Strategy: Will you have a lean storeroom, or a storeroom that never suffers stock outs? Will you enter bill-of-material (BOM) data into your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) ahead of time or as you make entries for specifically used equipment? Who’ll enter that data? What about kitting or vendor managed inventories (VMI)?
Employee Strategy: Have you identified the skills your employees need to perform their jobs? Do you know which employees have those skills and which don’t? Are you going to hire for new skills, use contractors, or train your existing employees in the new skills they need?
It’s obvious that having the answers to these questions in advance can head off major future issues.
When You Begin with the End in Mind—an end that entails an efficient and effective maintenance organization, that utilizes its CMMS to the fullest, that plans and schedules jobs in advance, and engineers the root cause of failures out of their equipment—you will see the earliest rewards for your efforts and investments. Keep in mind, those rewards are not only financial as shown here, but are also quality-of-life issues, i.e., no more calls in the middle of the night on a weekend. A well run Maintenance department should be boring.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Maintenance Organizations - HABIT 1
Habit 1 – Be Proactive
Being proactive is the ability to control one's own environment, rather than have it control you. It’s Self determination. It’s choice. It’s the power to decide your response to stimulus, conditions, and circumstances. The title of the first habit, and our frequent use of the same term in the maintenance and reliability field, is what originally drew my attention to the correlation between Dr. Covey’s 7 Habits and successful maintenance organizations.
Reactive maintenance organizations have a tendency to jump or react when a piece of equipment fails. Proactive organizations respond based on a predetermined strategy. Habit 1 means you are in the driver’s seat and you can decide which of these actions to take.
Take Charge: In a ranked list of companies in any industry, there is one at the top and one at the bottom. Your organization is likely somewhere in-between. Companies move up that list when they realize that doing things the way they have always been done continually yields the same results. Organizations have the power to make the necessary changes to move up the ranks by choosing to take initiative.
We Are Responsible: Being responsible is often viewed as being the person who should accept the blame when something goes wrong. But there is more to it than that. Rather than getting the blame, let’s do all the necessary things to ensure that things don’t go wrong. In other words, create the steps for success.
Step down the Path of the Effective Organization: The organizations at the top of that list we mentioned have made these realizations. They’ve decided what works in their organization, and they have learned the habits of doing it effectively.
Rule Your Equipment: When you are proactive you rule your equipment, it doesn’t rule you. Successful organizations have found the best way to do this is by deciding to move up the F/PF (Failure/Potential Failure) Curve. That move is accomplished primarily through the use of predictive methodologies (PdM) and quantifiable PMs.
Decide to Make a Plan: Then, do it. Successful organizations design and build highly effective maintenance departments. You have the power!
Check back next Tuesday for Habit 2!
Being proactive is the ability to control one's own environment, rather than have it control you. It’s Self determination. It’s choice. It’s the power to decide your response to stimulus, conditions, and circumstances. The title of the first habit, and our frequent use of the same term in the maintenance and reliability field, is what originally drew my attention to the correlation between Dr. Covey’s 7 Habits and successful maintenance organizations.
Reactive maintenance organizations have a tendency to jump or react when a piece of equipment fails. Proactive organizations respond based on a predetermined strategy. Habit 1 means you are in the driver’s seat and you can decide which of these actions to take.
Take Charge: In a ranked list of companies in any industry, there is one at the top and one at the bottom. Your organization is likely somewhere in-between. Companies move up that list when they realize that doing things the way they have always been done continually yields the same results. Organizations have the power to make the necessary changes to move up the ranks by choosing to take initiative.
We Are Responsible: Being responsible is often viewed as being the person who should accept the blame when something goes wrong. But there is more to it than that. Rather than getting the blame, let’s do all the necessary things to ensure that things don’t go wrong. In other words, create the steps for success.
Step down the Path of the Effective Organization: The organizations at the top of that list we mentioned have made these realizations. They’ve decided what works in their organization, and they have learned the habits of doing it effectively.
Rule Your Equipment: When you are proactive you rule your equipment, it doesn’t rule you. Successful organizations have found the best way to do this is by deciding to move up the F/PF (Failure/Potential Failure) Curve. That move is accomplished primarily through the use of predictive methodologies (PdM) and quantifiable PMs.
Decide to Make a Plan: Then, do it. Successful organizations design and build highly effective maintenance departments. You have the power!
Check back next Tuesday for Habit 2!
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