In an average maintenance organisation the effective working time of our technicians is around 35% of their day, which means that for 65% of their day they are doing something other than productive work. With good work management their effective working time can be as high as 70%. Work management is something every organisation has to do, so why would we not want to do it well?
When I was at the MESNZ conference last year I spoke to a lot of maintenance managers and planners & I asked them this question. “Have your planners been trained or did they just drift into the role?” Not one planner had received more than on-the-job training and most were technicians that just picked it up as they went along.
If good work management has the potential to double the effective working time of our staff why don’t we invest in training for our planners? As an industry we often put energy and resources training our staff in Root Cause Analysis for instance, even though the root cause often turns out to be poor work management. Surely it makes sense to get the work management right first.
I’ve been thinking about this since the conference and have come to these conclusions: –
- The role of planner is undervalued within most organisations.
- Training for planners is not as sexy as training in things like root cause analysis, which means that few courses for planners are available and even when they are offered they are not given priority.
- There are few qualifications for planners so there isn’t a natural route for up-skilling.
As engineers we go to great lengths to solve technical problems but we rarely give work management more than a passing thought. In fact, we often use one word to describe the whole process of work management – the word is “planningandscheduling”. It’s said as one long, all-encompassing word! Good work management should go through these five separate and quite distinct phases.
- JOB IDENTIFICATION AND AUTHORISATION
- PLANNING
- SCHEDULING
- JOB EXECUTION
- REVIEW
If your organisation is not going through this procedure with every job then you are probably working at the 35% effective working time end of the scale, rather than the potential 70%.
In New Zealand we rank 22nd out of 30 in the OECD for productivity. If the All Blacks were as good at rugby as we are as a nation at productivity, we would be sitting between Uruguay & Spain in the international rugby rankings rather than sitting at the top of the table. If we are able to punch way above our weight in rugby and other sports then it should be possible to do the same with productivity. I firmly believe that one of the quickest, easiest and cheapest ways we can improve productivity within maintenance is to invest in our planners, as they carry out what is arguably the most important role within the maintenance department.
I’ll ask you the same question I asked the maintenance managers at the MESNZ conference. “Have your planners been trained or did they just drift into the role?” If you answered the latter then do your organisation a big favour and invest in your work management staff. For most organisations it is the simplest, cheapest and quickest way to boost productivity within your maintenance department.
Phil Hurford is the manager of the Skills4Work School of Maintenance. You can contact him on 027 488 6446 or p.hurford@skills4work.org.nz to find out more about training in work management and other maintenance functions.