9.1 Resistance Discovered

Suppose that one of your initiatives as an internal consultant was to work with the site personnel to develop a detailed planning and scheduling process. The process was to focus on detailed work plans and deciding a week in advance the planned jobs that would be executed in the coming week. As part of the work process, you held meetings that included not only Maintenance, but also representatives from your customer, Production. This work took your team a considerable amount of time in order to develop all of the details of the process and to make certain that the requirements of all those involved were addressed. As the process was completed, you and your team launched into the training phase; over several weeks, you trained all of the maintenance and production personnel.

Then the much anticipated day of deployment arrived. At first everything appeared to be functioning well. However, after several weeks you noticed that the number of unplanned jobs was still at the same level as before the new process was deployed. You know this couldn't be correct because the new process was designed to eliminate virtually all of the unplanned work. As you investigated the problem, you discovered that the production supervisors and their maintenance counterparts simply decided not to follow the process. Their logic was that the work the crews were doing needed to be done now; it couldn't wait several weeks to go through...