Preventive maintenance…You can Expect…

Preventive maintenance …And important fixes

Where it concerns the preventive health of our customers’ equipment, we’re pretty disciplined about seeing that it’s kept in proper order. We’ll replace curtains before they get too raggedy and take care to replace those squeeze tubes pretty regularly. But in the case of a much more important kind of PM it’s often a very different matter.

And that particular piece of equipment is us and our health. Sure we’ll go see the doctor if we’re feeling really badly with the flu – or the emergency room for a stitch or two if we have a cut that a band aid won’t fix. But that all important annual checkup? Yea, not so much.

Maybe today would be a good time to make a call to schedule that checkup. And while we’re at it, ask the scheduler to have the doc place an order for you to donate a vial of blood so he can have your results in hand for things like your blood sugar and PSA levels when you visit.

Yep, preventive maintenance for our health is pretty important. And using that tool to get a handle on any possible “fixes” that might be necessary is just what the doctor ordered. Maybe it’s a bit like that squeeze tube … better to address it before it goes south.

You can Expect …What you inspect

When we ask an associate to do something it’s not an unrealistic expectation that it will actually get done. On the other hand unless we see that it was, it can be a 50/50 proposition depending on whom we made that request. In truth only the newest manager would not know that in the absence of checking, chances of failure are pretty good.

Managing consists of four steps: Goal setting, Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating. While that last one (evaluating) is more concerned with understanding how effective the three steps that preceded it were, if we first simply confirm that the plan (or request) was actually undertaken, that’s a pretty good start!

There’s one more benefit to confirming action and a downside if we don’t. If those we ask to do something know that we’ll almost certainly check to see it’s done, they’re much more likely to do it.

On the flip side if we rarely do, chances of success are greatly diminished. It’s a bit like the well intentioned parent who threatens their teen with grounding if they aren’t home by eleven but lets it slide when they arrive two hours late.