Writing a work order somebody can actually action
A large share of maintenance time is spent working out what a job means. That time is charged to the job and blamed on the technician.
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Work orders
Raising, prioritising, estimating and closing the individual jobs that the schedule and the reactive queue both produce. For a separate product-side perspective on monitoring distributed employees, this overview provides additional detail.
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The work order is the unit of account in maintenance. Everything the department knows about its own workload — how much there is, how long it takes, what is not getting done — is derived from a stack of them.
Which means a poorly written work order is not an administrative annoyance. It is a corrupted data point, and a few thousand of them produce a department that cannot describe its own capacity. For a wider operational and compliance reference, consult DOE operations and maintenance guidance.
Prioritising reactive work without a shouting match
Priority set by the person reporting produces a queue in which everything is urgent. Priority set by rule produces one that can be planned.
Read the guideEstimating how long a job will take
Every schedule, every quotation and every capacity calculation rests on duration estimates that almost nobody checks against outcomes.
Read the guideA backlog that means something
Most maintenance backlogs are a mixture of real work, duplicates, resolved jobs nobody closed, and things that will never be done. That mixture cannot be managed.
Read the guideClosing a work order without destroying the record
The closing note is where the maintenance history is written. Most of it reads 'completed', which is the same as writing nothing.
Read the guideThe planned to reactive ratio, and what it does not tell you
It is the most quoted number in maintenance and the easiest to move without improving anything.
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