Many times, we focus our procedures on specific tasks such as syncing a generator to the grid or the valve lineup of a fluid system. My previous posts covered how important it is to train your staff for procedures and how we should write those procedures. As I go through different projects, old lessons-learned pop into my head. This lesson has played out for me over and over throughout my career.
Whenever I’ve gone to a new company, there’s always a learning curve to just get the hang of the basics. This one memorable time, I was working on a design package for some electrical equipment. I needed to know how to put the administrative pieces together to start the package for approval. When I posed the question, most had no idea as to the actual process. Each group that I asked had a different process. I asked if there were procedures for such a task. Nothing but perplexed looks. I finally found some people from the more experienced generations (yeah, mine, too). Much to my surprise and dismay, most had worked for this company for less time than many of the ‘new’ people!
“If you can’t describe what you’re doing as a process, then you don’t know what you’re doing.”
The more I asked, the more I realized that everyone had their own way of doing things. Their methods were all based on tribal knowledge and the reasons were lost in the past. Depending upon who had approval authority, they had their own review requirements. One group had a mechanical engineer who hadn’t done any engineering in over 20 years reviewing electrical calculations. As I shortly discovered, rework was massive! I’ve seen inefficiency in my career but this department took the cake!
After finishing my tasks in that department, I moved on to a different department within the same company. The demographic was much the same; primarily young faces who had less than 5 years of real-world experience. The real experience within the company was few and far between. Fortunately, this department had proceduralized all of their processes. Unfortunately, there were hundreds of procedures! Over the years, they had created procedures and then began lumping directions into whatever procedure may be somewhat related. The procedures had gotten so out of hand that a guidance document was created to summarize the totality of the procedural guidance and give direction to what procedure held what task. This document eventually blossomed to over 500 pages!
Finally, a couple of the more experienced still around from the earlier years realized that this was a huge problem and they began consolidating and updating procedures. When I came to this department, they had been busy for over 2 years consolidating and updating. They were over halfway through but there was still a substantial amount of work to go. It was a race against the clock to fix the procedures before what little experience remained was gone.
I’ve seen similar events in many industries.
One industry that I’m familiar with has proceduralized every action and process. So much so, that they’ve almost removed the human element and suffer when the ‘set of hands’ that they’ve created fails to think about a task, causing things to go wrong.
Another industry I know well barely uses procedures. They had amazing craft but as the new generation was coming in and the old was going out, errors and injuries began to pile up. I pushed the management to begin proceduralizing their tasks before it was too late. Unfortunately, I think it was already too late and they weren’t moving fast enough to get ahead of the problem as I was leaving.
Meet the author: Dave Cates
The procedure needs to be made for the situation. In the case of this post, it’s capturing processes. A procedure that captures a process needs to be descriptive enough that a new user can puzzle their way through, especially when we all know that the experienced people won’t be around for much longer to help them. We also, too, need to ensure that there is enough room in the procedure for the new users to adapt the old processes to the new methods and technologies, such as updated computer systems or new manufacturing methods. As the baby boomers retire, we need to ensure that the next generation of worker is prepared and doesn’t wind up wandering around like I did looking first, for a process, or next, through a stack of mislabeled procedures to perform a process!