Dear boss, don’t listen to me! ... (and 6 self-checks to avoiding sounding like that)

Why industrial plant performance improvement, despite lots of methods, software, standards, and being the holy grail pursued by thousands of engineers around the world, seems to be so elusive to obtain?

So many causes could be cited, but perhaps one of the most relevant is that we are just so in love with our internal cryptic ways of communication, that we forget to use the language of the decision-making, the language of value, when communicating our improvement initiatives to the environment.

An exaggerated example may be a (not so) fun way to recognize it

We say: Dear boss, the addition of a spare pump will allow for an improvement of the availability of the pumping function of around 3% and an improvement of operational reliability of 5.2% with its associated impact in OPEX and LCC.

We sound like: Just barely tolerable boss, I’d love to have this new pump so bad. As this system is so mega interconnected, I have no really a clue if we are going to grab any penny of such investment, so... well, I decided to give you just the numbers I could calculate from a paper I found on the Internet. You’re the boss anyway, so you should know better than me. Wouldn’t be so awesome not having to run after a pump failure? I’d be really a much happier person if this mega-rich company buys that pump for my plant. In the end, that’s just pennies for the owners. Please buy it for me, assume all the responsibility for me, or I’m going to be reeaaally angry with at you! 

No, I don’t want to imply plant, reliability or maintenance engineers are mean and evil people. What I say is the way we express our ideas make us look, if not mean, at least a little out of order when checked against the business priorities. Perhaps we’re so in love with our probability functions, our percentages, and our advanced excel spreadsheets, that we miss the point in our communication, which is the business value in our recommendations. 

 A procedure that may help us to show the world the wonderful (and useful, caring, charming and good-looking) people we are may look like next.

Before opening your e-mouth ( I mean pushing the “send” button) it may be of value to verify some of the next ideas:

1. Do I know what are the value-dimensions my company really mind? Economic, Safety, Environment (don’t laugh, some corporations honestly mind it), image, …and, am I taking them into consideration?

2. Do I have a clear border of the situation I’m trying to address? (…so I don’t over or under promise anything)

3. Do I have evidence to show how my study identified, in a structured manner, the causes, and not just the symptoms of the addressed situation?

Tip: The more the voting (democracy-centered-engineering) and brainstorming (bad-weather-centered-engineering) during the analysis process, the less the chances of having a solid analysis structure.

4. Do I have an objective forecast on how my proposed approach will affect all the value-dimensions that my organization care about?

Tip: Having a model that manage interdependencies and randomness may ease the analysis computational complexities

5. Do I have financial figures that evidence how the cost and benefits combination end sufficing the investment policies of my company?

And last but not the least!

6. Did a get rid of all that confusing acronyms and percentages that just make the communication more complex?

This list doesn’t pretend to be exhaustive, but I’m sure you’ll get more buy-in if several of these questions challenge you before your boss does it!

Any other value-centered idea for the list?