The “sad” reality is that there is a natural resistance by many to focus on being brilliant at the basic first. The reason is the emphasis on transparency which implies that it becomes very difficult to hide lacking performance of individuals and teams.It is all about making it easy to identify and eliminate losses and to measure real performance. Unfortunately many are scared that this will expose them and they will rather do their own thing where they feel they have more control and can therefore manipulate results for personal agendas. This implementation therefore also becomes a natural way to optimise your workforce. Senior management commitment is therefore critical even if there is significant resistance at other management levels.
The other reason is that the first things we learn in a skill are the most simple and some may find this boring. They “run-off” to find something more challenging and unfortunately waste resources in the process because the basis is not solid enough to support those “bigger” challenges. Swallowing our pride and dedicating time to get the basics right is invaluable. Unfortunately, practicing the basics is easier said than done. Often, the basics are, well basic. However, there are always ways to manage a team in such a way that each individual stay engaged. Supporting culture and people development basics are very important here.
Example: Engineer investigating yesterday’s breakdown. I am an engineer myself and know how any good engineer wants to use all that engineering knowledge to solve and re-design any problem. A major project to “improve” equipment or components becomes the end result where procedures were not followed, basic maintenance were not done or basic task execution were not done after the previous failure. It is therefore critical to keep the problems away from the engineers as long as possible, it should only reach them once you require that special knowledge they should have. The basics questions must first be answered and actioned by the first line operational team. These include:
1. Is there basic conditions? Go and see!
2. Were the procedures followed? Is the data reliable?
3. Were the maintenance plans executed? Is the data reliable?
Take action by either restoring basic conditions, schedule training or disciplinary action or maybe the data recording method, procedure, maintenance plan or management infrastructure should be improved. Once there are changes required the engineer can get involved but also only if it really requires engineering input. Remember, even if your engineers are well trained to first apply the basics it remains a significant waste to spend engineering man-hours on something that could have been investigated and executed by your first line operational team.
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