Cultural Realignment in Maintenance Workforce Re-engineering
G Bahn P Durrant & R Platfoot
Alignment to the personal needs and requirements of individual people in the maintenance and operations team is crucial to the success of cultural change programs.
After passing through a cultural change process described in the full paper (available at www.amcouncil.com.au), and having definite role guidelines and responsibilities set, a position description document (PDN) now becomes more meaningful. The PDN is supported by other role-defining documentation that has been described in this paper and was developed as part of this process in conjunction with the stakeholders themselves.
In the course of this work, people believing that a position description should be a single sheet of paper with a basic outline have witnessed the benefits of using the document as a tool of change. In this instance preliminary work has removed a large percentage (if not all) ambiguity from the PDNs. These include:
It is recognised that any documentation can have a limited life span as it depends solely on the support it receives from those currently in charge in maintaining its currency and promoting its use. In the case studies behind this paper, there was considerable benefit in ensuring the personnel had direct input through personally appreciating their role in the improved work flow business processes. The hard work and thought processes in getting the workshops to occur and everyone having had an input into their own PDN is a positive outcome and augers well for its future use and benefit.
In terms of direct measurement of outcomes, the lift in cultural performance will impact work management KPIs such as scheduling compliance and backlog management. We understand that manipulation of the data and poor work control practices will artificially improve these KPIs where there is management focus, and this allowance for corruption of the data has to be taken into account. But work place audits, interviews and direct engagement with maintenance teams soon sorts out where this corruption is endemic and will address the problem. Auditing is an essential part of sustainability and needs to remain positive by celebrating excellence and relevant by focusing improvement initiatives.
One of the key learning’s from this work has been respect for departments who may well have turmoil in terms of low productivity, lack of communication or lack of discipline to corporate processes. What we have found is that these departments are aware of the shortcomings and simply needed a baseline to specify what had to be improved. The baseline would also provide a gap measurement of where they were to where they needed to be. The value of PAS 55 is that it sets a credible baseline providing additional work is undertaken to understand the business processes which are feasible within a specific operation, based on the plant’s needs, the organisational design and the communication paths/systems available to the stakeholders. Cultural change can never be imposed but is a transition process, where progress has to be measured in an objective manner either by audit or by external means such as formal KPI reporting.
A second key aspect of this work is the recognition of what is needed to ensure sustainability of compliance to the established processes, and excellence in work outcomes. Maintenance departments are in continuous states of flux with new people, plant changes and changing management directives. The two key sustainability processes used in this work are auditing and the issue of simple guidelines which are endorsed by the executive and can be implemented. In this work, like the definition of effective PDNs much relies on simplicity of communication and engagement of the stakeholders in the documentation.
Steps to Effective Cultural Change
With the establishment of the need for change and why completed, workshops are required to review the preferred workflows depicted as process flow maps in order to test its logic, (Manganelli RL & Klein MM, 1994). These process flows are helpful to all stakeholders in understanding their roles as well as the correct use of the systems to manage the information.
Workshops, necessary to ensure process ownership and understanding, determine roles and responsibilities. This is a consequence of mapping the sequence of what work needs to occur and when, plus the tasks and decisions that need to be carried out to achieve the required outcomes, (Dennis P, 2007). Where dissention occurra senior managers are called in to confer and decide upon what position is responsible. One technique which is commonly deployed is a RASCI chart.
On a RASCI chart, a matrix defines for all the tasks and decisions carried out in the overall process “who” is Responsible, “who” is Accountable, “who” provides Support, “who” should be Consulted and “who” needs to be Informed.
Standards of performance are documented and communicated, ongoing reporting and feedback, and critically an auditing regime.
Having determined who does what, detailed Position Descriptions (PDNs) need to be written. Senior managers and must be involved and consulted in the PDNs layout and content. The target audience, or who is going to be the main user of this information, is identified as a complete novice and the PDN is written accordingly.
The authors wish to thank their colleagues in the Covaris team plus the sundry Covaris clients who have supported this work and made these research findings possible. The authors would also like to thank Mr D Daines in particular for his support of PAS 55 implementation and effective standards documentation. Dr Platfoot is a member of the Institute of Asset Management (UK) and acknowledges this authority as the technical source of the PAS 55 public specification.
References
Manganelli RL & Klein MM, The Reengineering Handbook, Amacom (1994)
Dennis P, Lean Production Simplified, Productivity Press (2007)
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