Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Assessing critical infrastructure and facilities is essential for maintaining performance as systems age. Mid-level engineers are frequently tasked with leading a reliability assessment with limited training. The good news is that you don’t need to be a subject matter expert to be successful. But you do need a structured collaboration approach and a mental model to help you through the tough spots. Success rises and falls based on the quality of the facilitation. [Read more…]
Communicating with FINESSE and JD Solomon Inc. are jointly focusing on asset management in early 2024. The articles include how to facilitate asset management plans, ways that asset management plans fail, how organizational context impacts implementation, and how to communicate asset management to senior management. These powerful articles will improve your asset management success!
Facilitation is a structured session(s) in which the meeting leader (the facilitator) guides the participants through a series of predefined steps to arrive at a result that is created, understood, and accepted by all participants. Not all asset managers are great facilitators.
These are my Top 5 tips for facilitating asset management plans:
5. Get the Right People Involved
4. Don’t Overthink the Gap Analysis Tool
3. Create a Charter
2. Establish Organizational Context
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The mental model CATER will help you recall the five techniques that improve collaboration and team dynamics. CATER does two big things necessary for all greatly facilitated sessions. The mental model creates comparable knowledge among participants and opens feedback channels for successful collaboration.
CATER is a mental model that identifies the core components of a system and helps you wrap your head around how the components interact. [Read more…]
The mental model CATER will help you recall the five ways to improve any form of team facilitation. CATER does two big things necessary for all great facilitated sessions. The mental model creates comparable knowledge among participants and opens feedback channels for successful collaboration. Apply systems thinking and improve team performance by CATERing to your participants. [Read more…]
Majority voting and consensus decision making are two distinct approaches to making decisions in group environments, each with its own characteristics and implications. Consensus decision-making is an alternative to debate and passage of proposals that can be approved through a majority vote. It does not emphasize the goal of the full agreement but instead focuses on acceptance or “living with it.” Choosing the right method for the context, and more importantly, managing the dissenting view, is important in making good group decisions.
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Facilitating with FINESSE: How to Guide People to Powerful Business Solutions is a practitioner’s guide for ten common applications that technically trained professionals are frequently asked to facilitate. The range of applications covers quality and reliability techniques such as block diagrams and tree diagrams through master plans and strategic plans. This article provides five impactful elements for professionals who are often enlisted to lead teams to workable solutions, despite having little or no facilitation training,
The book focuses on ten practical applications and provides specific ways to facilitate them better. There is not a lot of wasted time on the basics covered by most facilitation books. Each self-contained application includes examples – good and bad – from my experiences on some complicated and controversial projects.
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Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. Facilitation plays a pivotal role.
Facilitators should understand the strengths and weaknesses of the qualitative assessments we facilitate and design. Qualitative assessments measure the opinions, attitudes, knowledge, perceived behaviors, observations, beliefs, and experiences of individuals who use a system the most. The correct understanding is fundamental as we lead participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all. [Read more…]
Opinion-based data is the foundation of qualitative assessments. Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. This article summarizes a review of ten risk matrices performed by facility owners or their consultants. [Read more…]
Technical professionals are often asked to “lead” teams through the application of assessment tools such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), Root Cause Analysis (RCM), and Reliability Block Diagrams. In some cases, you may be a department manager. In other cases, you are the subject matter expert. Sometimes senior management simply knows you are willing to do it.
The issue is not whether you are smart enough or the most personable engineer in the group. The problem is that you may have all the hard skills required to do the assessment, but you lack formal training in the soft skills. Most of us do the best we can.
This article provides some insights for doing better rather than just being adequate.
Leading is about learning to be a facilitator – Ashif Shaikh
Ask yourself, when teams work very well together, what are the positive characteristics of the team leader? When teams are dysfunctional, and have poor outcomes, what skills of the leader need to be improved?
Giving proper feedback is a great way to help a colleague improve FMEA facilitation skills. Carefully listening to feedback from a colleague is an important way to improve one’s own FMEA facilitation skills. Both are aided by understanding and using facilitation quality objectives. [Read more…]
“A genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus but a molder of consensus.”
Martin Luther King
One of the challenges for any team leader is bringing the team together and agreeing on decisions and actions going forward.
Consensus building is the best practice for all of the FMEA team decisions. This means the FMEA team takes the time to understand all sides of an issue and finds a solution or determines a course of action that is supported by all team members. Facilitating is a consensual activity.
Mediocrity can talk, but it is for genius to observe. – Benjamin Disraeli
The Inside FMEA series has completed the primary facilitation skills. The next few articles will cover special facilitation topics.
This article talks about the pros and cons of using a “scribe” to help with facilitation. [Read more…]
“Interdependent people combine their own efforts with the efforts of others to achieve their greatest success.” Stephen Covey
If you’ve been reading the FMEA facilitation series, by now you understand the primary facilitation skills. Studying and applying these skills will help you achieve excellent results in FMEA applications. [Read more…]
“Honest disagreement is often a good sign of progress” – Gandhi
The Oxford English Dictionary defines “conflict” as, “an incompatibility between two or more opinions, principles, or interests.”
Conflicts are bound to arise from time to time. They can be positive and beneficial. An absence of any expressions of disagreement or conflict may indicate a problem in adequacy or quality of facilitation. Facilitators should not be afraid of conflict, but should learn the value of disagreements and how to manage them. Understanding the difference between healthy debates and dysfunctional arguments is critical to good facilitation. [Read more…]
FMEA facilitators can generate deep discussion and stimulate creative ideas by asking probing questions.
“A good question is never answered. It is not a bolt to be tightened into place but a seed to be planted and to bear more seed toward the hope of greening the landscape of idea.” – John Ciardi
The Oxford English dictionary defines “probe” as “seek to uncover information about something.” [Read more…]