In September I will be conducting a webinar entitled, “Improving Maintenance Staff Performance.” It’s a topic that has been of great interest to me throughout my career, spurred on by a special HUD demonstration program I was involved with in the late 1970s.
In that program, HUD tried to replicate the British use of time standards in its “social housing” programs. A small number of public housing authorities in the US were selected to test the model. Essentially, it involved establishing specific, down-to-the-minute time standards for the more common maintenance tasks such as changing a faucet or replacing a closet door. The demonstration program was fairly sophisticated for its time because it also looked at other issues related to maintenance performance, including systems and organization. In the end, the time standards didn’t translate so well because many of the agencies had so many other more basic operational problems that needed addressing. In other words, there was so much “low-hanging fruit” to pick, why bother with something as complex as setting time standards for jobs?
I remember one particular situation that really drove home this point and it’s something I’ve never forgotten. We had a consultant on our team named Dick Houston who was a very talented, “old-school” (at least we thought so at the time) engineer. We sent him out one day to analyze a particular housing authority’s need for an automated inventory system. When he came back, I asked him, “So Dick, would this agency benefit from a computerized inventory system?” He replied, “Probably. But first they should put some locks on the doors. I just wandered into the central storage with no one around and could have walked out with thousands of dollars in parts and equipment,” he explained. “Without those locks, all the new inventory system is going to do is tell them when they need to re-order more parts to be stolen,” he dead-panned.
It was a lesson that still has value today. In my experience, there is low-hanging fruit in even the most sophisticated maintenance operation and, let’s be honest, few meet that definition. In future articles and in our webinar in September, I will discuss some of these easy pickings.