For those of us with a little gray in our hair or perhaps a lack of hair, Tom Peters in his book, In Search of Excellence , talked about skunk works, which were unauthorized projects. They usually had no official budgets or managers. Yet, many of these skunkworks turned out to be huge winners for their companies. If I remember correctly the well-known sticky note from 3M was one of these.

I've just been scanning several books in preparation for a new issue of RELIABILITY®Magazine and time and time you see the phrase, "requires top-level" Management support.

I'd like to know what have been the biggest maintenance and reliability related skunkworks that you've either participated in or heard about (in case you want to protect the guilty).

Once had the very enjoyable task of leading an "anti-vibration" effort at commissioning of a major four unit plant. We trained mechanical maintenance techs to make "acceptance test" type vibration measurements, prepare a standardized report / observations / comments, diagnose what they could. In effect, we wanted to give them "ownership" of the machine's monitoring file from the outset.
They were keen and really went at it. One great example was various fans, with some structural resonance issues. They conceived and tried successful corrective modifications to them all, and then "undid" them (because such changes had to be run through formal ECN's etc).
Another example: A mid-sized chemical company once did a study to find the common characteristics among people who'd received outstanding contribution awards. The only common thread they found was that these people had been a real pain in the butt to management, to the point that they were on the verge of being dismissed.
Here's a general point to consider. Think about it--- The better your technical idea or innovation, the less likely general management will understand and approve it.--- Meanwhile, less worthy ideas will be better understood and approved.
The skill of effective communication / persuasion / negotiation is vitally important to technical people.[I once floated the idea (old Board) of developing a course in such "soft skills" communication for young technical people. There was zero interest].

Perhaps it was precieved as 'BS' or bafflement rather than brillance. I find $igns do the trick sometimes, but as pointed out too much technical jargan and it's like putting vasline on the screen.

Good topic Joe; sorry I can't really contribute positively.

The biggie for me was a project engineer going nuts and losing it as the job he had designed was failing miserably. The guy was beside himself: I told him to walk away and come back in three days - he did and a few of us put it in working condition and gave the job back to him. I think he though he would lose his job had it failed before management during the 'dog and pony show'. But the hillbilly engineering came through.

The background works may be due to some management may be scared of risk taking, negative consequences of changes, trying or trial and error, avoid failures at all costs even if there are more lessons learnt from failures than success, going into uncharted territories, maintaining status quo & existing comfort, having hidden agenda, etc. Even when an idea is forwarded through a formal suggestion channel, it is rejected. So the normal action would be to find away around it. However, some doers may be want to experiment first before going formal.

In a related topic, it was said staff performance management should be focused on managing those who can do excellence, not on those who have poor performance. I think this applies to maintenance people as well.

Maybe soft skill training will help but the mindset of the organization should change too and be conducive to accomnodate necessary changes.

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