Yes.
It doesn’t matter if you’re an executive at your company, if you’re a coach of a sports team or if you have an important role at your church. We are all leaders. [Read more…]
Are You a Leader?
on Maintenance Reliability
A listing in reverse chronological order of these article series:
- Usman Mustafa Syed — Aasan Asset Management series
- Arun Gowtham — AI & Predictive Maintenance series
- Miguel Pengel — Asset Management in the Mining Industry series
- Bryan Christiansen — CMMS and Reliability series
- James Reyes-Picknell — Conscious Asset series
- Alex Williams — EAM & CMMS series
- Nancy Regan — Everday RCM series
- Karl Burnett — History of Maintenance Management series
- Mike Sondalini — Life Cycle Asset Management series
- James Kovacevic — Maintenance and Reliability series
- Mike Sondalini — Maintenance Management series
- Mike Sondalini — Plant Maintenance series
- Andrew Kelleher — Process Plant Reliability Engineering series
- George Williams and Joe Anderson — The ReliabilityXperience series
- Doug Plucknette — RCM Blitz series
- Robert Kalwarowsky — Rob's Reliability Project series
- Gina Tabasso — The Intelligent Transformer Blog series
- Tor Idhammar — The People Side of Maintenance series
- André-Michel Ferrari — The Reliability Mindset series
When Metrics Drive Behavior
I’ve had a lot of responses from last week’s podcast about Fear-Based Leadership, specifically around the use of metrics. Metrics drive behavior and we, as leaders, need to be careful about what we’re measuring and how our people perceive our use of those metrics.
What do I mean? [Read more…]
Are You Leading From Fear?
On last week’s webinar (released tomorrow on the Rob’s Reliability Project podcast feed), we spoke about using metrics & KPIs to understand where your company is on their maintenance & reliability journey. Metrics and KPIs are helpful but often, I see them used to discipline, to incent and, in the worst cases, to fire people. [Read more…]
How Is Your Organization Leading?
Early in my career during a period of low commodity prices, a high-level executive sent an email to middle management with the following context:
We are not willing to spend money on new software, projects or ideas. If an engineer comes to you with an idea. tell them to look into how we’ve always done it and get them to do it that way. [Read more…]
Myth Busting 9: Planners do all the planning
This myth, is about who should plan your work and there is plenty of confusion around this one. For the most part, I’d agree that planners should do this, but not all – see below.
First understand that all jobs should be planned and those plans should be saved as “standard jobs” (or whatever you want to call them) in a job plan library. Plans should be written once and then used many times. Each use, subjects the plan to what is happening in the field and therefore each plan is subject to upgrading with each use. Feedback from the trades in the field triggers that continuous improvement loop that keeps plans current and ready for next use. [Read more…]
What Are You Experiencing?
A lot of us are heading back to the office, back to the plant or back to the facility and the game has changed. Lock-down has changed our companies and our jobs in different ways. Are you seeing more tracking, more monitoring, more metrics, less trust? Are you seeing more love, more compassion, more human-centered leadership? How has your job changed? Are you excited or anxious about going back to work? [Read more…]
Who’s Job Is It?
Yesterday, I got a question from the subject matter expert (SME) for one of the equipment types for which I manage the capital strategy. He asked me who was in charge of the operating scope (when and how long to run the equipment). My first reaction was that it was supposed to be him. [Read more…]
Myth Busting 8: Who should schedule work
This myth is about who should schedule work.
There are three roles involved here: planners who plan the jobs, supervisors who supervise their crews and schedulers who create the work schedule.
Planning, as stated before, is all about what work gets done and how.
Scheduling is about when the work gets done. The practical constraint is that no work goes on a schedule until you are sure you have everything you need to execute that work when you schedule it. [Read more…]
How to Use CMMS to Improve OEE and TEEP
Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is a widely implemented metric that characterizes the performance of a plant, and is expressed as a percentage of the total planned or scheduled production time. OEE essentially measures your plant’s performance in terms of equipment reliability and availability. It is calculated as the product of 3 factors – performance, quality, and availability:
Myth Busting 7: Planning meetings
This myth, planning meetings are for planning, is based on a misuse/misunderstanding of correct planning and scheduling terminology. Planning meetings are normally run by your planner, but they are not, or shouldn’t be, about planning. They are about scheduling – i.e.: when work will be executed. Planning defines what work (scope) will be done, how to do it (instructions, guidance, specs, etc.) and what is required to do it (resources, skills, permits required, etc.). Scheduling is done to define when the job will be executed and by which resources (skilled trades). [Read more…]
Love, Compassion & Healing
This past week, I was getting really frustrated, angry and hateful towards myself. I kept seeing the root cause of my problems and I wasn’t able to let it go, I wasn’t able to heal. I started laying into myself, beating myself up in a way that is appalling. I shut down. I stalled. On Friday, I had a call with my coach and she told me what I needed to do. [Read more…]
Myth Busting 6: Planning by trades
This myth, planning should be done by the trades, has a big impact on common practice, but when you talk to those who do it, they’ll often agree that planners are needed. That is an apparent contradiction and it arises due to sloppy use of terminology in the maintenance world.
Many companies have heard that planners should be skilled trades and misinterpret that to mean that your skilled trades should do planning. No, no, no. [Read more…]
The Hidden Costs of Not Caring About Our People
The more people I talk to in industry, the more I see a divide. I see a divide between companies who treat their employees like robots and companies who treat their employees with the love & connection that they deserve. We’ve all experienced disengagement, frustration and apathy throughout our careers and it costs us our happiness. It costs us our mental health.
It also costs our companies. It costs them big dollars. [Read more…]
Compromise & Sacrifice
While I have a very uncommon last name, I come from a big family. The picture below is the family my grandparents grew by having three sons. Thomas (my father) whose family is dressed in red, Walter dressed in white and Robert (Mike) dressed in blue had 16 children between the three of them and as a result if you live or know someone who lives around Spencerport, New York there’s a good chance they know a Plucknette or two.
Myth Busting 5: It Won’t Work Here
I get asked a lot of questions and asked for a help. Sometimes the “ask” comes from senior management, sometimes middle-level management and sometimes even from the shop floor. People and companies need help to achieve more than they are today.
Performance is already known and often less than desired. Change is needed and that means new ideas. After all, if they had the ideas themselves, they may have tried something different before calling me in. Sometimes they have, and it hasn’t worked. They are stuck. [Read more…]
