Today’s Gremlin – Perfectionist

Today’s Gremlin – “Perfectionist”, is often a planner or an engineer. This Gremlin holds himself or herself to extremely high, pretty much unattainable, standards. They cannot be found to be wrong by anyone. Perfectionists go to great lengths to get everything they do, 100% right, 100% of the time.

We all know that getting part way complete, even a large part of the way complete, is quick and easy. Although whatever we are doing may not be perfect, it is close and for most purposes, it may be good enough.

Nothing is good enough for the perfectionist

Today’s Gremlin – “Perfectionist” doesn’t worry about how long the job takes, or how much effort it requires. The output must be absolutely flawless in all respects. Nothing is left to chance. Every little detail is checked and double-checked. When complete you can be confident that the job is well done.

But all that effort to get it right consumes time. In today’s business environment with many things all happening at the same time, with pressure to produce, and new work arising, you can’t afford to be slow.

80/20 – the rules that seems to apply everywhere

A perfectionist is after 100% on all his / her work. But that takes time. A good maintenance planner, with relatively few interruptions, can focus on his planning work. He produces perhaps 5 to 8 good plans a week. The perfectionist produces no more than 1 or 2, and then stresses over possible mistakes because not all facts could be checked. Fortunately, most of us are not perfectionists or very little would ever get done!

Meanwhile, the 80% plan, produced by a productive (non-perfect) planner, makes its way out to the field sooner. Mechanics will find mistakes and provide feedback for their correction. If an 80% plan get’s an 80% correction, it becomes a 96% plan for the second time it is used. After that 2nd use, we clear up another 80% of the remaining errors to get 99.2 % plan. That’s pretty good for us flawed humans, and it hasn’t taken a lot of time.

Now let’s boost accuracy and speed

Yes. Today we have this new technology known as Generative Artificial Intelligence. It generates content based on what we ask it for. You can ask it for a training lesson on doing the Tango, or anything you can dream up. I’ve tried asking it for maintenance job plans for specific jobs and the result was surprisingly good. In fact, I’d say it was better than those 80% plans produced by most planners, and good enough for the perfectionist to struggle finding flaws.

Based on that discovery of the power of GenAI, I worked with a few colleagues to create a tool for planner productivity. We call it AIJobPlanner. It is a software tool that asks for specific maintenance job related inputs, and then goes out to the internet and your own data, creates a job plan to do what you asked, and send its output to you in a format you can easily use with a work order.

I was surprised at its accuracy, easily as good as, if not better than what most planners produce. I was delighted with its speed. A perfectionist does one plan every few days. A more typical good and uninterrupted planner does 5 to 8 in a week. AiJobPlanner did its high quality draft plans in just a few minutes. Allow another 30 minutes or so to check it for accuracy, add in your storeroom’s part numbers and do a quick check on the steps, then you’ll be producing more than 40 in a week!

Training and care required

This new GenAI tool is great at producing high quality job plan drafts. It’s better than those 80% plans and whole lot faster, but you want to make sure it is accurate. You don’t need to be a perfectionist for that, but you do need to check it carefully and make sure there are no glaring errors. To get the best value from it, you can use that time it saves you for better checking on spare parts availability and on more thorough scheduling of work and on field visits to double check on plan contents. You can also use some of that time to incorporate the trades’ feedback after your plans have had a trial run in the field.