Time to talk about the topic at hand this month which is: How does discipline and accountability (or lack thereof) affects the performance of your Maintenance Management (MAM) process? As many of you have heard me say these two items are the top two problems in America today, not just in the maintenance world but in every aspect of our day-to-day lives. Let's just concentrate on the maintenance problems today, fixing all of the other problems in the world may take more than the words in this article.
Discipline - When I speak about discipline I am not referring to the discipline you and your team have coming to work on time and putting in eight hours of real work. What I am talking about is the discipline to do the right thing the same way each and every day of your maintenance life. I'm talking about your maintenance process. Establish how you want to run your organization's process and do it with discipline. Here are some examples:
- Write accurate and completely filled out work orders of all work, not some, not part, not just the important ones but all work.
- Plan all work which is not emergent.
- Schedule all planned work each week on a well-written work schedule which is published each week and mailed to your leadership team and some customers.
- Demand accurate man-hours are documented on all completed work orders.
- And, many more...
That is the discipline I am referring to. You must have a process and you must follow the process the same way each and every day of your maintenance life. If not, you fall back into the world of reactive maintenance chaos. Most of us have been there some time in our life and most of us don't want to go back there.
Accountability - Now let's get to the accountability component. This one is a little harder to complete and it actually takes some discipline to do it. The accountability process are the things you have to do when you find that the discipline stuff mentioned above is not being followed, who, or what failed in the MAM process? Most of the time it is not what failed but it is who. Someone did not perform, follow the process, or make good judgement calls that contributed to the success of the process. When you find this you must take action and hold those individuals accountable. You do this by identifying:
- what went wrong,
- what should have taken place,
- discussing how we prevent it from happening again, lastly
- talking about what the consequences will be if it happens again
I can hear some of you saying boy he is a real hard ..., but this is the only way to ensure the process is followed properly and accurately.
Good luck to all of you and I hope to see you at the upcoming IFMA conference in San Diego and also the NFMT- Las Vegas conference.
