Change is Hard Period... Here Are Five Way To Make It Easier.

So as I look back on 2013 it was a year of extreme change for me. It may have been the same for you. I had more change then any other part of my life. Some was work and some was personal but it all can feel nearly the same if the situation is right. So how do we deal with all of that change? How do we help our ourselves, our peers, our employees, or our bosses deal with the change that is inevitable in 2014. Here are five things that helped me and I hope they can help you too.

• Don't change just to change  (Need help evaluating change click here.) Have a reason, a plan, and a goal. Change is not always good but if you have put in the thought and are ready to move forward or if it has been forced on you then you must work to create a plan to deal with the change and identify where you want to be at various points moving forward in time. These may be metrics or concrete locations or even just feelings that you want to have but know what you want and by when. Document it. This plan brings structure to what can be a really unstructured time. It also meets your needs as you move through the phases of the change process. Next identify what you have to do to make those things happen. Many of the activities take time. For example affected people don't change over night. Plan for that dwell time. This will make the plan more realistic and attainable.

• Identify for what might go wrong during the change and then prepare and plan for it. If you can communicate what might happen and that there is a proactive plan for addressing it. This can provide comfort the organization. I have a risk planning tool here that might help.

• Find support. Friends in the business or personal world that have been through it.  What ever "it" is. They can provide advice or just listen when the change is tough. They bring good cheer and they bring a different perspective. I could not have made it through the year without these people to help me along the way.Thank you to each of you! If you are looking for others who can relate to the types of challenges we face in reliability then you might try attendee conferences like SMRP, IMC, and MARCON.

• Consider employing an expert. If you are trail blazing and no one in your network has been through the change don't be afraid to hire or team with an expert. These people with the experience are invaluable. They can cut time off of the change adoption process or demonstrate easier ways to get the same final results.

• Understand the psychology of change. It helps you know what to expect and when. I have put together a quick search for psychology of change in posts that you can find here. You will want to scroll down through the various blogs post that will be shown on the page and find the best one for you.

These are the first 5 things that really help me this year but I would welcome you to add to this list below via comments.
Thank you for reading and here's to an awesome 2014! Cheers

And Then There Was A Standard: ISO publishes ISO 55000, ISO 55001, and 55002 for Asset Management

News: And Then There Was A Standard: ISO publishes ISO 55000, ISO 55001, and 55002 for Asset Management
The  new standard addresses asset management, its principles and terminology, and the expected benefits from adopting asset management and can be applied to all types of assets and by all types and sizes of organizations.

The standard should be available here in the coming days.
http://www.iso.org/iso/home/store/catalogue_tc/catalogue_tc_browse.htm?commid=604321#!
You can check back to this page for additional information or follow the update feed on Twitter @iso55ooo

The 10 Traits of High Maintenance Manufacturing Organizations:

Seeing the recent Forbes Article on The (Unlucky) 13 Traits of High Maintenance People it made me think. What are the traits of a high maintenance manufacturing organization or facilities?

So let’s look at 10 of the 13 categories from the article but in the context of manufacturing and reliability.

1 -They have urgent “needs.” To a high maintenance sites, everything is urgent. All the repairs and upgrades to their assets are done without proper planning or the lead time to properly source parts economically. They don’t use predictive technology to identify equipment problems in advance.
The 5 second solution: Set criteria for work that makes it clear what is an emergency repair and what should be planned and scheduled for the future. Emergent repairs can cost as much as 5 times as much to execute. Use predictive maintenance technologies like vibration analysis, ultrasound, etc. to help identify failures before they happen and proactively plan the repair. There is a great post here on some of the benefits of predictive maintenance.

2 – They have a sense of entitlement. Everyone deserves to be treated with equal respect. The high maintenance facility will expect more. They request more work in process inventory allocation, larger maintenance budgets, more staff and higher capital allotments.
The 5 second solution :  Create benchmarks metrics that accurately represent the organizations or facilities and allow them to take a journey of self-discovery. This will enable them to challenge their own levels of entitlement, especially as they try to explain their variances.

3 – They could be self-sufficient. But they’re not. They constantly look to corporate for support and funds to improve the site and they blame their situation on the fact that they are not receiving the support they "need".
The 5 second solution: Build a plan to self-fund your improvement process. Many sites are able to start their improvements early in the fiscal year and generate the financial returns to offset the expenses prior to year end. The well thought out plan is the key to this success.

4 – They cling to stories of facility wrongs from the past. The high maintenance sites have a difficult time moving past real or imagined corporate wrongs. These may include corporate enforced reduction in force efforts, budget cuts, or failed past corporate initiatives. 
The 5 second solution: As a leader, you do individuals locked into the “blame game” a favor by not playing into the negativity dialogue. “I’m sorry that happened. But you’re here now, things are different, and we have work to do.”

5 – They talk. Continuously. The high maintenance site thrives on attention. They have a continual need for others to hear what they have done. While discussion best practice sharing and brainstorming is necessary and healthy, these sites prefer to talk about what they have done not what they are going to do. They are not necessarily interested in improving; only showing what they have improved.
The 5 second solution: Finish every discussion and presentation with a challenge. "What are you going to do better and different to improve within the next year?"

6 – They are seldom satisfied. High maintenance sites will find the flaws in every situation. Even when they’ve been given extra care and attention, they will invariably find something wrong with the solution or service they’ve received. For example when they receive an opportunity to produce a new product they will only focus on how hard it will be with their existing equipment and resort to an additional capital request.
The 5 second solution: Make it clear that everyone understands nothing is perfect but that the site has the knowledge and skills to solve the problem and if and only if they can’t solve it should they return to corporate for additional support.

7 – They are high-strung. Not all high-strung organizations are high maintenance. But the organization with excessive needs will be persistently vocal and anxious about the things they require. They are the squeaky wheel in search of grease.
The 5 second solution: Again – it’s a dependency you shouldn’t encourage or feed.

8 – They live in a state of perpetual drama. If you are around a high maintenance site for an time at all, you will observe frequent periods chaos and turmoil. Every small inconvenience or mistake becomes a crisis.
The 5 Second solution: Take the time to list the common items that create their drama. Help them to create proactive plans for how each of these failures or issues is going to be dealt with.

9 – They handle money poorly. Regardless of the economy or circumstance, high maintenance sites continue to spend recklessly on inventory and parts. They use overtime like it is free. They don't think of the business cases behind the decisions they make.
The 5 second solution: Instill business case thinking using A3 documents or some other tool and ensure that they think from a life cycle costing perspective.

10 – They resent authority are often critical of other sites. It is extremely difficult for these individuals to respect corporate authority or to see the bigger picture. They focus only on their site and do not go out of their way to work to benefit the company as a whole.
The 5 second solution: Generally, in a case like this, there is direct intervention required. Remind the site that the business is like the body and one highly effective arm on body that is in a coma is useless.

By now you may be detecting a pattern of traits. Responsibility lies with the organization to create and reinforce a positive culture. Do you have a working environment that allows bad behaviors to take hold and fester? Do you actively feed and reward the positive behaviors? Do you set a good example yourself?

Do You Need More Wedding Planning in Your Plant Outage?

So lets talk about really solid outage planning and scheduling. Not the half-hearten effort that I sometimes see organizations pass off as planning and scheduling, we want to see the good stuff.
Imagine if you will, a wedding. It could be yours or your kids, but think back to that process. Here are just some of the key pieces that were crucial to creating that special day.
Scheduling starts early with all big life turnarounds:
You picked a date for execution of the plan. Hopefully, it was not a reaction to a problem that was brought to your attention during the previous week and instead was scheduled well in advance (a year) and with the full agreement of all parties. It hopefully was picked based on resource availability and with the agreement of both members of the operations team, the bride and groom.
Budget bound:
A high level budget was created based on either what you were willing to spend, what you had available, or what you had been allocated from the parental organization. This at first is an order of magnitude or a not to exceed number that you broke down and further detailed as the planning process was completed.
Experts do what experts do:
Unless weddings are a particularly interesting past time for you then you probably lacked experience in certain areas or may not have had the resources to do all the work internally. For those areas you might have hired an expert. Experts could include professional wedding planners, musicians, tent and table erectors, chefs, photographer, and florist. These people do not always work well together so the coordination was key. For instance if the photographer arrived to do his work before the tent erectors or the florist you could have a real problem on your hands and face embarrassment, lost time and money. That is where the detailed schedule has to be defined and followed.
Planning and then Scheduling:
With all the additional labor needed and all of the task that must be completed in a timely manner you more than likely first built a simple plan and then with time expanded on that plan with detailed steps or task for completion. That plan included pre-work items that had to be done in advance and items that would be executed on the day of the event. The plans included all the important details like what songs to play and what foods to serve. All of these could then be sequenced into the schedule and a critical path review could be performed. Normally here in the US people are not prepared to attend a wedding where it takes two days to complete the ceremony because some forgot to tell the caterer that it was a mid day wedding. Getting all of the activities completed in a 4-6 hour period is important. The critical path tells us if that is possible with the choices we have made. So both time and money become limiting factors that must be attended to. Since we know time lets look at money.
Request for Quote (RFQ) budget refinement:
If you are like me, once you decided on the date, time, and the location and the types of expert that you needed you began to get bids and and built a more complex budget with allocations to each part of the event. There were trade offs and discussions until you finalized the monetary side of the plan. Do you spend more on the dress and less on the flowers? Can we get a DJ instead of an orchestra?
At the two week out point you review the job plans, evaluate weather and family risk and put mitigation strategies into effect as required. Aunt Suzy did not want to set next to uncle Carl so you updated the seating plan one last time. You verify completion of the pre-work and you mentally prepare for the big day by meeting with your operations partner. At this point you cross the final gate and green light the event knowing that it is the best that it can be. 
Your outage should be no different. Everything you see above should be done in the plant too.
Remember all this planning went into one 4-6 hour day and your outage may be a week or even longer. Are you planning and scheduling like a wedding planner or do your weddings aimlessly go on for days?