One practical question.

I assume that most of us involved in reliability discussion has some practical and/or theoretical background related to maintenance organization. So each of us know much about importance of developiing people in maintenance department: training, work teams development, coaching approach to management and, one very important issue, developing and maintaining proffesional pride among craftsmen.

My question is how to go with it in practice. I have very real situation to go as on-contract manager in established company that is renting plant maintenance to manufacturing plants. My task is to smoothly enlarge organization to be able to handle additional orders. That involves hiring many new craftsman and putting them "into fire".

What is the problem? New employees come with different background and need to be introduced into company culture. They are carefuly hired but not ideal - some of them have significant gap in konwledge although they are very skilled in part of their trade. Some of them don't have perfect professional approach. I know that it can be smoothed over time with training, communication-lot of feedback, and after all by active care for each of them. But that takes years.

So after we initially checked them, put them to work for a while, we are gradually sending them to do the works at established clients. How to make sure that all of them will follow established procedures for preventive/routine corrective tasks, not to mention that they also need to make some indenpendent decisions which must be in accordance with generic work procedures.

The only solution I found so far is to commence developing comprehensive maintenance task library, generic and equipment specific. After procedure is initiated, every craftsman has time to study it and make comments. In regular meetings comments are discussed and procedure agreed. Now crutial moment comes: our document controller issues signed procedure and every craftsman must finally sign statement that he/she fully understood the procedure and takes full responsibility in implementing it on work.

That way formal responsibility is developed. I initiated several regular meetings on addition to the one for procedure discussion. The purpose of these meetings is to develop cooperation and communication to mitigate "cold" feeling that all these written statement must have caused somewhere deeply in their minds. It seems that emotianal balance is achieved, but I will not be sure for that for a long time.

I am interested in comments and suggestions.

Thanks

May I know what kind of procedures that need to be signed off by those craftmen? We use ISO9000 and records are surely signed off by the doers, no big deal because any non-compliance will be tracable. Another thing that I can think of is to use experienced craftmen to train those new ones and to work under them eventually. So the senior craftmen will take pride in proteges. Tq

Make the craft sign that they have read and understood the procedure will not guarantee that they will follow the rules.
Give 20 people a paper where they have to sign a phrase like:
I hereby declare that I in full control of my mental abilities...blah, blah

Everybody will say: Yes I do, if you don't sign it, you will be looked upon as dumb, if you sign it, there always be a fear that this document will be used for getting rid of you when things go wrong.

The only way to ensure that they understand the procedures is to take tests. The not so proficient ones will be spotted, and you can make a special program to get them up to speed.
If the craft sees that you are making effort to bring them to a higher level, they will appriciate it and take pride.
I had a training in rigging and hand-signaling conducted for the craft, and they loved it. With pre-test and post-test.
Before the training the atitude was: I have been lifting equipment for years, what can they teach me?
After a rigging, a fasteners, a seal training, they start asking: Boss what and when will be the next one, and they are preparing case stories and their experience, to ask the instructors.
Of course, it is done by experienced trainers, that know how to speak their (the craft) language.

Thank you, every thought related to this gives me better feeling.

Josh, you are right when you say that just writing the statement is not big deal, but that is just what I want to avoid - to have that just as ordinary paper formality.

Having senior craftsman as head of groups would be ideal, but my problem is that I don't have enough senior craftsmen for many new groups - this business is growing right now and I have to avoid losing confidence from any customer's side, especially from old ones.

svanels, your advice is very aligned with what I am trying to do: to obtain their buy-in. We have to conduct most of training in-house because topics are either plant-specific equipment maintenance or basic generic maintenance (mounting/dismounting bearings and seals, new belt installation) for which I cannot get budget to pay outsourcers as we have enough supervisors (sometimes I conduct sessions myself, mostly in order to get as close to people as possible).

My biggest problem are people that apparently have sufficiant knowledge, but still have desire to make "shortcuts" in field. Over time such behaviour can be isolated, but what I need is enough time, and I don't have it. I would like to introduce even some public recognnition of fail-proof workers, but it is hard to realize it as good behaviour is normal and bad is not accepted at all so it would look as negative-selection list. I was also thinking of travelling inspectors that do spot checks, but such activites could offend majority of good and proud workers... How to quickly put relibility in their minds...

Children (sorry people) will make shortcuts when they are left unattended.
We have a monthly site safety talk of about 30 minutes (you must have a very good excuse for not being there)
We enforce weekly group safety talks (so called toolbox meeting), it is tied to our incentive plan. Still you have to remind supervisors and foremen to conduct them. A mechanic also can present a safety talk, we had one 2 months ago about firecrackers !!
If you take a walk in the field, still you will find someone in violation of something (no harnass, unauthorized scaffold, safety googles in shirt pocket, not wearing ear protection) or an employee who stunts on his own motorbike when he is on the road...

dc2 don't focus too much on reliability alone (probably the craft doesn't care about the terms)reliability theory is for higher educated staff (and still they don't get it )
Focuss on Safety, there are a lot of issues they will recognize in their day-to-day activity. Maybe a guy will take a shortcut hammering on a bearing, but if he has seen a 15 minute safety short video about eye injuries, he will automatically reach for the rubber hammer.

Don't know the training rates in the USA, must be very expensive , but we arrange one day trainings, and pay the instructors day fare. The only limitation we have we do not exceed 15 persons. We develop the program together with the instructors to get a coherent system.

It is tempting to do training yourself, but not because you know all about bearings, you are automatically apted to transmit it to others.

Having senior people to train junior people
you must not be surprised when someone comes to your desk and say:
Boss I want a raise, beside mechanic, I am also instructor and that is not in my job description.
What do you tell him? NO!! probably you will lose a potential instructor.
You buy him out, be aware that tomorrow also the biggest slacker will come for his instructor's fee .

The supervisors/foreman have too much to do to train the craft, I would leave that to specialists, it doesn't have to be costly or fancy, it can be done by someone of a vocational school, or a trainings instructor from another company.

Hullo DC2,

You mention encouraging pride and developing culture. I compliment you and suggest you are on the right track.

But you talk about skills and procedures in the same breath, and this intrigues me. The latter are the 'hard' elements, while pride etc are 'soft' elements. While the two elements influence each other, they are distinct left brain/right brain activities.

If you want to develop pride and culture, you have to work directly in that area. You are of course correct in getting their skills up to scratch and having proper procedures in place. These are essential pre-requisites. Theses are necessary conditions in developing pride, but I would suggest you need to do a lot more.

For starters, consider
- getting workmen to sign off each job, by name
- getting equipment restarted in their presence
- measuring repeat failures and complimenting workmen whose work does not result in repeats
- encouraging long runs rather than fast restoration; again measurements are required
- encouraging workmen to 'borrow' good practices; reward both the borrower and the lender
- encouraging team performance rather than heros
- encouraging them to participate in Root Cause Analysis studies and implementation
- not pushing for speed, instead press for quality (this is a good way to show your own interest in developing pride)

Culture is a bit more difficult to tackle, but pride is the first step in developing culture. Concepts of ownership, team spirit and trust are involved. One wrong step by the manager can wreck painstakingly built culture. The leaders and managers are usually the wreckers, so consider tackling them first, before worrying about the workers. Encourage fair play, especially when rewarding or praising people or groups.

I think I have said enough for the moment. I wish you success.

V.Narayan.

Thanks all,

It is obvious that you feel the core activities of my task - to get something as fluid as pride and professional approach with something "hard" as procedures and documents.

In the meantime even more new people had to be hired. It is already established as routine to have the game called "follow our procedures", which includes prizes for everobody who "passes" initial phase, and those who not are mostly encouraged to make a little more effort.

It works well for most of people. Works something like "you are good and skilled, that's why we have you here, but please take consideration of our necessary formal task procedures to reach full satisfaction of your superiors".

dc2,

One other point. If you have a CMMS, use that as a tool to empower people. Let them do some of the detailed planning and scheduling, getting parts,consumables, request for cranes etc. and get supervisors to facilitate them rather than supervise them as in 'bossing' them. Train supervisors to be friend, philosopher, guides, assisting with technical knowledge and experience. For an hour or two every month, get those of them who remeber their high school maths behind a desk and train them to do analysis (MTBF, MTTR, Compliance and other KPI calculations). Let them experience the result of their work and that of their colleagues. These type of 'investments' help build pride and ownership. Also get them to investigate failures, going deeper than the 'broken bits' level.

Good luck.

V.Narayan.

Im sure letting the guys write their own procedure helps. Experience shows that once you get to the job what you read about and trained for is not always reality. Keeping procedures rigid will always cause problems because the issues cannot be "legally" worked through.

After these procedures are actually used in the field, maybe have another meeting discussing what could be done better.

Shortcuts are not always a bad thing, unless you force somebody to be doing something "wrong" when they use one. Short cuts are the backbone to productivity and should be utilized unless safety or law is violated in the process!

In short, dont squash innovation...encourage it.

The word 'shortcut' makes me cringe. The word implies that some part of a procedure is skipped. In the motor repair industry, it would often mean that insulation was left out or machine fits would be peened. Both have negative impacts on reliability, but will allow the motor to survive through warranty in some cases.

Continuous improvement or optimization implies that a process was applied that improves the overall process.

In effect, if there is a problem with the process, or an improvement is required, a documented process change allows everyone to use the benefit. If not, then once the person(s) that use the shortcut leave, or are unavailable, then the problems that generated the need for the shortcut come back into play.

As far as this general topic is concerned: Buy-in at a facility is dependant upon the existing culture. This is a function of the leadership at the site.

Bill,

I am also of the same opinion as Howard. When I mentioned empowerment, I was talking about the workers being allowed to do the 'whole' job, not just the wrench work. However, writing procedures needs more than just the knowledge of how something is currently being done, important as that is; while we can get the ideas of the current process from those doing the work, the procedure should be written by somebody with an overview of the process and an ability to judge how it may go wrong.

The second aspect is that you want only one procedure to do a given task, not one per person doing it. So it is best written at a higher organizational level.

The third aspect is with respect to changing an existing procedure. Change control must be exercised when doing so, including a proper risk analysis. Else serious incidents can occur.

I am sure your observations on 'short-cuts' were not meant in the context I am using in my comments, but some readers might understand it in that manner. So I am writing this as a word of caution.

V.Narayan.

Good point, I used a bad word. I don't really know a lot of your backgrounds, but I just came from that wrench-turner position and have stepped into management. I know all too well that no matter how good a procedure is, the real world application of it is sometimes very hard to overcome.

We always preached following procedures 100% and I agree. After the fact if there are things that caused major runarounds they should be fixed. The problem with most people is, as soon as the "bad times" are over they forget about them, so when someone asks how the job went, "oh just fine" and that redundant or impossible to perform as written step remains.

Nothing would make me feel better than to have a procedure changed to a better way.

And don't leave out parts!

I have enjoyed reading this post and agree that procedures are required in a multi-level skill setting. Pride in your work and job completion is no doubt one of the largest and most important factors! However, pride alone is not a very effective tool, nor is procedural processes and guidelines, unless the individuals you task do not have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and respond to difficulties as a challenge and not just a job! I believe that you cannot teach pride, either it is there or it is not. The weeding must begin at this point, not after the training. I am sure there will be a large disagreement with the above. That is all right it is just how I see things. Thanks for the opportunity to contribute.

JB

Point well taken. Should actually be built into the interview process.

Howard