DIKDAR with Paul Daoust

In maintenance and reliability industry, soft skills are just as important as the hard skills. When you are faced with uncertain and complex situations, it becomes difficult to make good decisions. That’s why it comes in handy if you are good at critical thinking and can perform better under pressure as compared to your peers. Some organizations have competitive environment and they have limited resources to deploy for different programs. In these cases, they need to identify and put certain activities in place that would help their employees make the best use of those scarce resources.

It requires a lot of thinking and decision-making to come up with best practices across the organization. To do more is sometimes what is required and that requires time to implement smart solutions using good decision-making skills. There is an acronym—DIKDAR—that would help you better understand the process that results in smart decision-making. This starts with having good data and then extracting useful information from that data. Once you have that information, you can utilize it to make smart, informed decisions. This will then become knowledge to help you take different actions that you think would be viable depending upon the situation.

All the while, you are comparing data, information, and knowledge to use the best possible action to achieve the results that you need. The actual decision-making process should start by taking input from everyone involved but the first step would be to realize the risks and uncertainties involved in managing your assets. There are different approaches that organizations use depending upon the structure and culture of the organization but asking questions and trying to find the right answers before you begin is always the best approach towards bringing value to the organization, using good decision-making activities.

Sometimes, the organizations have to make decisions in a real time manner but planning ahead for different scenarios while developing business processes and strategizing helps you eliminate problems when you start implementing actions. Leading organizations always put some time and thought into deciding how they are going to build a structure around the decisions they make in order to avoid complications down the road. There are a lot of tools in the industry for decision-making which provide you solutions that would work for you but good problem solving and smart decision-making is the base of every single tool.

A3 is one of the simplest tools out there to help you outline the ideas and plans for your decision-making process. It allows you to establish your goals and objectives from that process as well. It helps to go with the gut and putting some of your experience into decision-making process but developing an evidence based framework is what helps you solve complex problems. Data holds great value if you can use it to obtain actionable information. Also, tracking your performance, having accountability procedures in place, recording results from various decisions to build your knowledge base, and learning from it over time to achieve operational excellence is what separates leading organizations from the rest.

Eruditio Links:

• Eruditio
• HP Reliability
• James Kovacevic’s LinkedIn
• Reliability Report

Paul Daoust Links:

• Scio Asset Management
• Paul Daoust Linkedin
• PEMAC.org
• Why I Love Netflix’s Decision-Making Culture
• Managing to Learn: Using the A3 Management Process to Solve Problems, Gain Agreement, Mentor and Lead
• The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles from the World’s Greatest Manufacturer
• MainTrain
• Hubbard Decision Research
• How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas W. Hubbard
• The Failure of Risk Management: Why It’s Broken and How to Fix It Hardcover by Douglas W. Hubbard
• Bulletproof Problem Solving: The One Skill That Changes Everything by Charles Conn, Robert McLean
• Decision-support: The proportional use of technology and people in solving problems and making better asset management decisions by John Woodhouse, Managing Director, TWPL

192-DIKDAR with Paul DaoustJames Kovacevic

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