Maintenance change management: Negative work
Jonathan Guthrie in a comment on a LinkedIn discussion described what he called “Negative Work”. I think this might be a good tool for building a desire for change in the maintenance workforce. I’ll let him describe it.
“All too often the maintenance resource is treated as a free resource by other areas of the organization, for example projects. Projects demand the maintenance resource, usually at short notice, to drop everything and assist in the installation and commissioning of new equipment. The cost of this does not come from the project budget as they do not have to account for the use of 'internal' resources, yet year on year the maintenance department will witness a reduction in the maintenance budget by way of a cost challenge from top management and spend a great deal of that in clearing punch lists and snagging from 'completed' projects.
REAL WORK is a planned job, fully scoped , with a good estimate, including time to record in the CMMS what was done, all required resources available (permits, materials, specialist tools/vendors), allowed to start and complete without interruption.
NEGATIVE WORK is unplanned work, the interruption to the schedule, the kneejerk stop what you are doing and help with this other activity which has suddenly been 'deemed' more important than what was planned and agreed.
NEGATIVE WORK can be measured: break-ins, unscheduled completions, cherry-picking jobs etc. and with a combination of visibility, policing, intervention and training the behaviors’ relating to the creation of NEGATIVE WORK can be addressed.
There is a work execution metric that I have used to identify NEGATIVE WORK both in terms of number of work orders and the estimated hours scheduled v the actual hours recorded.
This metric is 'Completed in the Scheduled Week'. The base assumption is that usually there is a weekly agreed prioritized WO schedule which can be measured against during the execution week as the 'frozen schedule'.
As work orders are marked as completed during that execution week they can be compared against the 'frozen schedule'.
So each completed work order has a derived 'Completed in the Scheduled Week' indicator.
'Completed on the Scheduled Day'
'Completed in the Scheduled Week'
'Break-in completion in the scheduled week'
'Break-in completion raised in the previous week'
'Completed NOT in the Scheduled Week'
'Unscheduled Completion'
'Scheduled'
Once the execution week has past, the number of WOs/Est.Hrs. Scheduled in the frozen week remains for trending purposes. WOs that were not done can be re-scheduled to a future time without affecting the trending.
For identifying NEGATIVE WORK we are interested in the Break-ins and 'Completed NOT in the Scheduled Week' and 'Unscheduled Completion' categories and need to drill down to the work orders to see the context of the 'Schedule Breakers'. This visibility highlights the 'Schedule Breakers' and the groups/individuals behaviors responsible for not sticking to the plan.
One immediate response that I have seen from the technicians and supervisors to the introduction of this report is their commitment to record in the CMMS all the activities/interventions that they are asked to do. They like the idea of taking the credit for all the hours that they put in and are much more accurate about recording actual hours and the actual dates for completing the work.”
I like this measure for a couple of reasons. One, it helps account for all the functions performed by the maintenance department, and so helps us manage and publicize our work. Two, I think it could go a long way in the change management process towards building a knowledge of the need and a desire for change. That way, we get the workforce behind the change effort and maximize our chances for a successful change.
Have you used something like this in your organization? Has it worked?
Key Takeaways:
1. Account for negative work to identify and publicize your total workload.
2. Use this information to build a desire for change in the maintenance organization.
Take a look at my presentation on the Dimensions of Change
Dimension of Change presentation papers.