Operators can no longer rely on a ready supply of resource to effectively buy their way out of the inefficiency problem, and the sooner this truth is recognised the better.

Considerable effort and rigor is often placed on the development of and training in risk assessment and management. This rigor and resulting confindence in the mechanisms can inadvertently lead people and organisations to take much more risk.

I've personally seen examples where the reaction to industry benchmarking has led to an organisation destroying its culture and demoralising its staff.

In 2019 it was identified that there were 3,910,000,000 tonnes of hard coal left in the UK yet it only produced 2 million tonnes in that same year. In 1999 that figure was 37 million. There comes a point that availability to meet demand wilts in the face of public pressure and Oil and Gas is the new coal.

It could be argued that almost any decision is an opinion, however, wherever possible that decision should be made based on an interpretation of accurate, factual data. The simple truth is that on a large number of occasions within many industries, decisions are not. They are made, based only on past experience (which may no longer be relevant), gut feel and personal preference

The challenge for the continuous improver is the the psychological response to losses is stronger than the response to corresponding gains.

There are a lot of posts on social media from people looking to motivate, inspire and get people into a positive mindset, and many of these posts receive a huge amount of likes, which can only be a good thing, however, how many of the people hitting “like” are actually then working to adopt that positive mindset?

How unspecified “self evident” company objectives like customer safety, ethics or even just company reputation were sacrificed in order to deliver on the specific business goals.

There’s no question that maintenance strategy reviews can help deliver a lot of these benefits if the existing strategies are not delivering the desired outcome… However, before embarking on a maintenance strategy review…it’s worth asking “Are we actually executing the maintenance we have in the system at the moment?”

Driven by a desire to continuously improve there is often a temptation to update KPIs to make them “more accurate” or “better” but this is not always the right thing to do.

There’s nothing sexy about practice or training, but it’s one of the biggest factors influencing success or failure. Having the discipline and commitment to train is what more often than not differentiates the good from the great.

On any given day…leaders within organisations already have an abundance of important tasks and a scarcity of time to carry them out. This means that even in the course of normal business, organisations would benefit from pushing decision making authority deeper into the hierarchy.

Whilst… job descriptions and process flows often state that costs should be considered, up to this point there has been little real reinforcement or encouragement to do so. To quote Leif Babin “It’s not what your preach, it’s what you tolerate”, and to date the industry has tolerated a lack of focus on costs.

If a workforce is downsized the organisation can’t reasonably expect the same volume of maintenance work to be executed as before without something changing.

There are times when a dramatic approach is necessary simply to survive, which is exactly why the industry has adopted these approached in the past. Once the initial weight has been lost, however, simply adopting the same approach will not work without causing harm.

if the rider is on a 13 year old bike, unfit, overweight and with horrendous technique, buying a state of the art Carbon Fibre Tour de France dream machine isn’t the thing that would have the biggest impact on performance.