I’m Jason Firth.
It’s been a long while since I updated, because I’ve been transitioning into a new role: planning and supervising the instrument shop, and supervising the gas fitters.
The transition from front line worker to front line supervision has meant a whole new set of challenges, and a whole new viewpoint.
As a worker, road blocks are a nuciance. “They really ought to make this easier”, I’d say. We’d all say it. Now, navigating those road blocks and keeping workers away from them is a big part of my raison d’etre. The more I can keep my guys working on jobs, the better job I’m doing.
There’s a lot of road blocks out there, too. From inception, the question of whether work should even be completed ought to be answered by supervision and management before a worker is ever even close to being assigned the job.
In maintenance planning, there’s a lot of processes that should exist and be followed to ensure the job is properly vetted. For corrective work, risk analysis can help justify work. For preventative maintenance, a methodology like Reliability Centred Maintenance can define and justify which work shall be done. For proactive maintenance, there are a number of failure mode analysis tools which can help dictate what work should be done in response to different unmanaged failures.
Following processes like these can help on two fronts: it helps ensure that front line workers aren’t wasting their time on work that is going to be immediately vetoed, and it helps ensure that supervision and management have their finger on the pulse of exactly what is going on and why. Besides that, it ensures that appropriate documentation to support work exists so you can go back as part of a living program and see how your assumptions worked out.
Next up are planning road blocks. Ideally, you should have all the parts kitted for the job, you should have all the steps identified, correctly documented, and permits pre prepared as much as possible. If you can schedule the job as well and coordinate with operations to get the equipment in question, that’s another major roadblock that front-line folks won’t have to deal with.
During execution, your best people will have their better nature working against them. People will want help with their personal priorities, but the problem is if you’re focusing on everything, you’re focusing on nothing. It’s important to keep your people on the task at hand. For those who have personal priorities, they need to enter their work into whatever work management process you have.
Looking at the big picture, the work management process is your most important tool. See the work, prioritize it, plan it, schedule it, execute it. This requires teamwork not just amongst your team, but amongst your site.
The “hey buddy system” is any time where someone sidetracks the work management process and tried to get their work done through side channels. This is sometimes appropriate for high criticality work, but usually it isn’t appropriate. Every job that gets done on the “hey buddy system” is another job that went through the proper channels that got delayed. When someone successfully gets their job done this way, it reduces the credibility of the process, and increases the number of “hey buddy” jobs done.
This is the easiest roadblock for great workers to hit: the traffic jam. A hundred uncontrolled jobs hit at once, and in trying to keep everyone happy by focusing on all these jobs, none but the simplest jobs get done.
If I’m doing my job right, then everyone should win: the workers should be less stressed out because they can focus just on doing the work safely. Operations should have the right work happening at the right time. Supervision and management can complete their due diligence in preparing work, and a system of continuous improvement should help make the process consistently smoother.
To be honest, although I took the career track change for professional reasons, the reason I get out of bed in the morning (and one of the big reasons I applied for the job) is knowing how difficult life is on the front line when you don’t have someone there willing to handle these problems.
As for a different perspective, You get to peek out from the front line and see (or even steer) the path ahead. Changing from being a passive observer of what’s coming down the line, you can become an active participant.
I’m sure I’ll have plenty more to say in the future, but this is what I’ve learned so far in my crash course on supervision.
Thanks for reading!