The truth is Lean Maintenance is fun. These investigations and projects are going to be the fun stuff, and are the part of maintenance that, if any of you have ever come up through the maintenance ranks, are maintenance engineers, or have hands-on experience designing stuff; this may be the most fun part of what you do.

You'll soon start to see some of the things we're going to address. The exercises in this work can be done with the people in the crafts. This work has been done in a wide range of organizations with a very wide variety of participants.

In a school (described in detail in a later chapter), we worked with the groundskeepers, who didn't understand English. I would give instructions and then one of them would translate it for everyone at the table. And the workers would do these projects, and you could feel the energy. So even though fun is against the grain in maintenance circles, we're going to shoot for that as part of these projects.