MTBE: The Mean Time Between Excuses

When it comes to asset management, one of the more popular key performance indicators is an asset's Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) which tracks the average amount of operational hours between breakdowns.  This a great metric and one of the building blocks of measuring the efficacy of your preventative maintenance programs.  

But before we can ever attain tracking MTBF, there is a more important indicator that you have to overcome.  I am talking about MTBE, the Mean Time Between Excuses.  

One of the toughest challenges we face when attempting to implement a work and asset management program is program adoption.  Users are finicky and notoriously hard to please.  We have all heard the quote by poet John Lydgate that was simplified and popularized by President Abraham Lincoln, "You can't please all of the people all of the time."  This is abundantly clear when it comes to any user base for a work and asset management software.  No matter what process, workflow, or software you deploy, your users will, if allowed to, come up with an endless list of reasons why they cannot or will not utilize the system.  

Every time you change the system to please one set of users, you give ammunition to another set of users to not utilize the system because they liked the old strategy and reject the new.  The more often you revise your process or workflow, the more it appears to your users that the system isn't consistent and stable.  Basically, the harder you try to please everyone the more you actually please no one and the easier it is for your user base to justify not using the system at all or not entering accurate and timely data.  Bad data can be worse than no data and certainly will never get you into a position where you can use the data to evaluate or address the Mean Time Between Failure for your assets.  

So what do we do?  It is imperative to have your executive management team engage in your work and asset management efforts.  They need to be seen as engaged in the process.  They need to communicate clear reasoning on what your organization is doing in terms of work and asset management, what the goals are, what the data will be used for, what the expectation of each level of user is, and to document these rules of engagement formally so that it is understood that compliance is mandatory and not optional.  In other words, system utilization is a condition of employment with real expectations and real consequences that will limit the Mean Time Between Excuses.

Now, we cannot be completely heavy-handed here.  Executive management engaging in this way necessitates that we have pathways for users to communicate real issues that are making utilizing difficult or to share revision ideas or improvement ideas for consideration by the asset management team.  It is our responsibility to take those complaints and ideas seriously and either adopt the change or clearly communicate why the change is not being made.  In other words, the user base needs to feel like a respected part of the asset management team just without the option of using flimsy excuses avoid using the system, even if the methodology is not ideal in their opinion.  

The bottom line here is that we will never have a successful system without taking a strong position in making utilization mandatory.  And, in some instances, users are going to feel like the documenting of work is too onerous, too time consuming, requiring too many inputs or too many clicks of the mouse, and a thousand other complaints to justify not doing what they are being asked to do.  The organization has to be clear that this is a job duty, even if it is a job duty they don't care for.  They are not being ASKED to do this, they are being TOLD to do this.  Sometimes you get to do fun and challenging work that you really enjoy and sometimes you get a job that is mind-numbing and you don't care for.  But they are being paid to do these tasks and documenting in the work and asset management software is no different than any other task they are assigned.  They might not like that they got assigned to clean the toilets but we aren't going to accept some flimsy excuse about not liking the color of the paint on the walls to justify them not doing the task.  

Document the organization's expectations, make it clear that the directive is coming from senior management, do your best to communicate why the organization is doing what it is doing for work and asset management and what the data will be used for and why it is important and valuable to the organization, and make sure it is understood to be a mandatory task and not an optional task.  

Reduce the MTBE so you can actually get to managing the MTBF of your assets.