Do you have a Staff Infection?

My son is a wrestler and wrestling no doubt is a contact sport. Thus, with every practice and every match he and his teammates are prone to obtaining a skin infection or staph. Staph is a bacteria, it can cause nasty infections and, worse, it can easily spread resulting in an entire team disqualified to wrestle.

Think about that, all it takes is one wrestler with poor hygiene to take out an entire team. Now think about this wrestling team as your organization. Can one person take out your entire organization; or less dramatic, derail your project? Yes they can.

Just as the wrestling team coach puts in place preventive measures to ensure good team hygiene, you must put in place preventive measures to ensure project success. This is Change Management.

Change Management is a process to drive adoption and usage so your project delivers expected results. Lack of buy-in at all levels can allow a single malcontent employee to infect the entire organization. Our approach to get buy-in is to use PRIDE in Maintenance as our Change Agent.

PRIDE stands for People Really Involved in Delivering Excellence and it focuses on your Operating Mission and formalizes the Contribution from Maintenance to achieve that Mission into a Maintenance Mission.

It’s amazing the buy-in you get when you create the Maintenance Mission, sign it as a team and hang it on the wall for everyone to see. This process creates the buy-in and accountability you need for sustainable project success.

Until next time, make every minute count!

About James: James serves as Advoco’s Maintenance Improvement Practice Lead. His career has been dedicated to Reliable Plant Operations Performance, with experience ranging from “mega projects on a global scale” with Fluor Corporation to owning and operating a South Carolina-based plant services company. Known affectionately in the office by his childhood nickname Jimbo, he is passionate about restoring the value and pride in American Manufacturing through our Reliable Operation Initiative (ROI) and PRIDE in Maintenance implementation approach. He’s also known for dropping “idea bombs” – his way of challenging others to think differently in order to solve problems. If you have a question for James or Jimbo (he answers to both!), please send him an email at info@advocoinc.com.