Do you need an assessment?

No assessment

Do you really need an assessment? Will it help, or will it create problems?

Your options are self-assessment, guided self-assessment, a lengthy and detailed assessment by a third-party consultant, and rapid assessment by a subject matter expert.

Not knowing what you don’t know is a big impediment to self-assessment. You might think you have a lot of experience but many years in one place translates into a little experience being repeated. You really need broader perspectives and experience to pull this off. If your people don’t agree with your findings, you will be in for an uphill battle.

A self-assessment after some training and with expert guidance can produce good results. You had better be ready to act on them though, or you will lose credibility among your people. Our guided self-assessment tool requires some training in the concepts against which you are assessing your performance and some help to turn what you find into a workable plan.

The rapid assessment by a subject-matter expert will take about a week and deliver a lot of information. It will certainly give you enough information to decide on whether or not to go further. It will have a business case, major areas for attention, and likely some low-hanging fruit you can tackle right away.

Big consulting firms do not specialize in reliability and maintenance, yet they can offer you an assessment. They use a conventional consulting approach. That begins with a detailed assessment to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome. A typical assessment can take three to five weeks. The consulting firm may or may not have a subject-matter expert (many do not). Beware – a consultant with just a few “maintenance jobs” under his belt is no expert.

We consultants all learn from our customers. But, if we don’t know the basics and learn more from a customer than we bring to the table, we cannot be considered experts. 

Following a detailed assessment, improvement strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team, facilitated by the consultant who did the report, and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization.

This approach is widely used. It is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement by a major firm. I’ve personally done hundreds of them. Now we offer a rapid assessment. Most others still offer a more pricey and time-consuming conventional assessment.

Assessments are intended as a start point for improvements. A creative use for them is to compare operating sites within a large company to see what they can learn from each other. Be careful though. That can turn into a contest to see who’s best. Once you have winners and losers, you get less reliable information from the sites, and risk demotivating the very people who you need to be engaged in making improvements.

Outside of maintenance and asset management, where a totally independent and unbiased perspective is required for strategic business decisions this approach – which assesses strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to the company is highly appropriate. For the most part, those corporate assessments are necessary to help executives who often don’t have a background in this field. It removes the smoke screens that executives often deal with as a result of multiple management layers beneath them. It can show what long-term benefits are just waiting to be achieved – if the executive has the courage to go beyond the short-term thinking of markets and shareholders.

If you know you need improvement and are already committed to it, then you can start more softly and without creating resistance to change. The benefits are intuitively obvious to you, so you probably don’t need all the justifications that others, less confident in themselves demand.

I’ve used this approach for several years to achieve quick gains, long-term plans for even bigger benefits, and to create ownership for making the changes. While many will struggle with change management, we have found a way to avoid much of the resistance. Our trick – avoid the 3rd party assessment and jump straight into educating your workforce in successful practices. Give before you take.

The conventional approach of assessing, recommending, and building an improvement strategy has a major flaw when dealing with people within an organization – it often leads to feelings of animosity towards those who carried it out. The nature of the process requires that judgment be applied to what is observed. That judgment usually takes the form of “this is good” or “that is bad”. At the corporate level when dealing with broad external and systemic internal factors where no one is to “blame” this works. Generally, it is less prone to generating feelings of animosity.

However, deep within an organization, when dealing with specific aspects of it like maintenance, like MRO materials management, like purchasing, etc., we are dealing with technology, processes, and people, and there is always a degree of “ownership” in the status quo. That “ownership” of the past is a big part (but by no means all) of what makes change so difficult to implement. An assessment score can be a real demotivator!

Unless you really need a score, then why bother with the 3rd party assessment? Your people already know what they are doing. What they may lack, however, is an awareness of what works best for the company and what does not. They need to have a sense of, “what good looks like”.

For example, I’ve met many materials managers who truly believe they are doing a fantastic job by keeping the dollar value of inventory levels down even though service levels (as determined by asking mechanics about their storeroom experiences) are poor. Money is saved in inventory (one of their KPIs) but lost to the lack of productivity (usually not a KPI for anyone) on the part of the tradesmen who waste time waiting (rarely measured) for parts that aren’t there. I’ve also met many maintenance supervisors and trades who are proud of their ability to get parts “in spite of” the storeroom’s poor service performance. That leads to a lot of stores, inventory management, and supply chain problems including excessive working capital tied up in materials that few even know are there. The value of those “stashes” can be huge – we estimated $100 million in just one large operation.

Other supervisors, trades, and maintenance managers are often proud of their ability to put out fires – get repairs done rapidly under arduous and emergency conditions. If you are into hero-worship or stroking your own ego then that is good, but the business would benefit more if the failures were avoided instead of repaired. An unbiased third party cuts through all that because they are aware of successful practices – they can see things from a different perspective. But who says that perspective has to come from a third party? What’s needed is a new perspective, but it doesn’t need to come in the form of someone else’s judgment.

Here’s a tool you can try – it’s our online (and free) maintenance and reliability maturity assessment. It will help you see, or perhaps confirm, that there is an opportunity for improvement.

You could also consider training in successful practice. Perspectives change through observation, learning, and experience. Training adds value from the outset, in the form of learning, while providing a safe environment for the generation and gathering improvement ideas. Rather than “observe and judge” we “teach and ask”. Throughout our training, we ask employees how they can use that new knowledge to change what they do today for the better.

The training expands their awareness and changes their perspective on what they see as good and bad. The lists of ideas are often staggering – and many of the ideas are easily implemented. Your employees and co-workers really do care and want to see things improve. It helps with job security and the working environment. We’ve found that once we open the “idea tap” it can actually be difficult to turn it off. And why would you want to turn it off? We’ve just unleashed the creative talent within a large group of people who all stand to benefit as your business benefits. From those ideas, we have the equivalent of the consultants’ list of recommendations – but it’s better – it’s theirs!

You can do this on-site with a live instructor, or you can do it with online training either pre-recorded or life-virtual.

The development of an improvement strategy from that point on is easy. Use that creative energy, encourage ideas, encourage questioning of the status quo, and then act on what you get.

Beware that if you get the ideas but don’t act on them, you’ll turn the idea tap off and things will not change. Inaction demonstrates that management really doesn’t want to change.

Beginning with training will avoid the animosity that can be generated as a result of assessments. It avoids a common and significant change management hurdle at the beginning of many corporate transition programs. Having a cross-functional group participate in training enhances teamwork foundations. Your operators, maintainers, and stores people actually talk to each other and gain an understanding of what each must contend with. You’ll find that most truly want to do a good job and to help each other. You may have grumblers too. Grumbling is usually a sign of deep, but frustrated care. Encourage them to speak up, even if they grumble. Use it as the seed for discussion. Remember that they really do care, or they’d simply keep quiet.

By using the improvement ideas generated by your employees we ensure that the transition is theirs from the outset. They own it. Any good change manager knows that if the ideas come from the people who must implement them, they are far more likely to make it work than to give up. What’s more, the ideas are based on years of their observations – they are accurate. No consultant, no matter how thorough, can beat that on their own.

Consultants who are only going to be there for a short time and are probably rushed will invariably miss something. They can miss the reasons why some practices are the way they are, misinterpret what was heard, get some of the wrong data, etc. Consultants can be terrific teachers, observers, and facilitators but they can’t replace the knowledge your entire workforce holds. That knowledge generates great ideas that rarely have an outlet. Our approach provides that. We help you tap into it, even if your own management team can’t seem to get co-operation. Independence and lack of bias can work wonders in a training format.