The Concept of NEGATIVE WORK

There is a lot of interesting discussion and theory around staff resistance to maintenance program initiatives regarding buy-in, training and supporting the maintenance program, however I think the simple insight is that the Supervisors and Technicians have seen it all many times before. Hence the negativity.

Over the years they have survived new systems and business processes and watched management initiatives come and go. Most of which from their perspective increased their workload rather than reduced it.

The ‘Dilbert Principle’ comes into play – ‘If you’re a surgeon, it takes a great deal of skill and intelligence to perform an organ transplant. It is much less challenging to write a mission statement for the hospital that explains your deep desire to avoid killing patients accidentally.’ – Scott Adams

You don’t want the administrator performing heart bypass surgery on you.

I believe that to achieve ‘buy-in’ from the workforce to continuous maintenance improvement you have to  change management behaviour around the maintenance processes.

All too often the maintenance resource is treated as a free resource by other areas of the organisation, for example  projects. Projects demand the maintenance resource, usually at short notice,  to drop everything and assist in the installation and commissioning of new equipment. The cost of this does not come from the project budget as they do not have to account for the use of ‘internal’ resources, yet year on year the maintenance department will witness a reduction in the maintenance budget by way of a cost challenge from top management and spend a great deal of that in clearing punch lists and snagging from ‘completed’ projects.

The behaviours are understandable. Projects are interesting, new and everyone  likes to be involved and talk about the project they are working on. Maintenance is continuous, repetitive, perceived as boring  and in contrast to projects, the maintenance overhead is  an area in which management always seem to be looking to cut costs.

For the maintenance departments, supervisors and technicians a simple formula can be described:

REAL WORK + NEGATIVE WORK = NO WORK

REAL WORK is a planned job, fully scoped , with a good estimate, including time to record in the CMMS what was done,  all required resources available (permits, materials, specialist tools/vendors),  allowed to start and complete without interruption.

NEGATIVE WORK is unplanned work, the interruption to the schedule, the kneejerk stop what you are doing and help with this other activity which has suddenly been ‘deemed’ more important than what was planned and agreed.

NEGATIVE WORK is also the realisation that the time spent in a planning  meeting discussing and agreeing a short outage with production and operations for an essential PM major equipment overhaul was wasted when ‘bumped’ by senior management to meet production targets.

NEGATIVE WORK is the production train wreck and long outage that occurred months later resulting from the failure of the equipment that had the major PM overhaul deferred/still to be done plus material damage to other related equipment.

NO WORK = With all these interruptions I don’t have the time to do this is the feedback you get from the supervisors and technicians at the mention of a new business process initiative for maintenance.

In my maintenance analysis work it is clear that assets that execute their PMs as planned stay up and have fewer unplanned outages. The more REAL WORK that they do the greater the reliability and availability of the asset.

NEGATIVE WORK can be measured: break-ins, unscheduled completions etc and with a combination of visibility, policing, intervention and training the behaviours relating to the creation of NEGATIVE WORK can be addressed.

I have seen organisations which have made the effort to address the behaviours associated with NEGATIVE WORK take great strides towards involving the organisation in the process of continuous maintenance improvement.

Sadly, no matter how lean, efficient and successful your maintenance group is at keeping the asset running with high levels of availability and reliability through continuous maintenance improvement , there will always be someone who thinks you can deliver the same next year with less. The annual cost challenge will always be there.