As companies continue to react to the rise and fall of their respective market demands, they “tinker” with their organizations trying to figure out how to “lean” their staffing, when in most cases they are already “anemic”. They continue to ask their employees to “do more with less”. This is especially evident with the maintenance organization. Companies will try to make the supervisors plan – or they try to make the planners supervise. They try to make the maintenance engineers into reliability engineers or visa versa.
Instead of carefully examining the roles and responsibilities, they just feel they can plug and play without understanding the true responsibility of a job role and the true qualifications of someone in the role or a candidate for the role. Then managers wonder why their organizations are dysfunctional.
Why can’t we go back to basics and understand what objectives we expect our organizations to achieve, design the roles and responsibilities to achieve the goals and objectives, and then fill the job roles with the personnel who (a) have the proper skills or (b) provide training to existing employees so they can properly function in the job roles?
The real reason we can’t? Most managers responsible for making these decisions do not truly understand the maintenance/ reliability/ asset management (you can pick) business sufficiently enough to properly staff it.
A Harvard Business Review article (12/07 page 72) said “A Customer… they can rarely tell you whether they need or want a product that they have never seen or imagined”. This is also true of most managers and proactive maintenance organizations. It is hard for them to say they want one – when they have never seen one. It is even harder if they have never imagined what it would be like to have one of their own.
If they ever see a proactive maintenance/ reliability/ asset management organization or even imagined what having one would be like – maybe we could cut through the “Organizational Fog”…
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