Every organization I’ve worked with has a Dave. Dave knows where the drawings are, which vendor to call at 2 a.m., and that the number in the system has been wrong since the 2011 migration. Dave works late. Dave is why the whole thing holds together.
Dave is also the biggest risk in your program, and it isn’t his fault.
A load-bearing person
When your program runs on a few people working extraordinary hours, it looks fine right up until one of them leaves. Then you find out how much of your asset management program was living in one person’s head. I’ve watched it happen more times than I can count.
And it’s getting worse. A big share of the people running our plants, utilities and facilities are close to retirement, and a lot of what they know was never written down. It’s in their memory, their notebooks and the spreadsheets on their desktops.
Signs you have a Dave problem
- One person gets called every time a critical asset fails, even on vacation.
- The job plans in the EAM are thin, and the real procedure is “ask Dave.”
- Capital recommendations for a whole system come from one person’s judgment, and nobody else can explain the reasoning.
- There’s a spreadsheet that runs part of the program, and only one person knows how it works.
- New hires take years to become useful because there’s nothing to learn from except the veterans.
Getting it out of his head
Don’t hand Dave a binder template and ask him to write everything down before he leaves. It won’t happen, and if it does, nobody will read it.
Put the knowledge where the work happens. The failure history belongs on the asset record in the EAM. The procedure belongs in the job plan. The reason a system is run the way it is belongs in a short decision note that someone can find in five years.
Pair people up. Put a younger technician or engineer with Dave on the jobs only Dave can do, and put it on the schedule. If you wait until there’s time, it won’t happen. There’s never time!
Then move decisions from people to rules. If the call to defer a replacement comes down to Dave’s gut, write down what his gut is checking: condition, consequence, spare parts, what happened last time. Now you have a criticality model and a risk tolerance your whole team can use.
If your program runs on a few people working extraordinary hours, you have a risk, and you better put it on the register.
What to do this quarter
- Name your Daves. Make a list of the people whose departure would hurt the program most.
- For each one, list the ten things only they know. Ask them. In my experience they know exactly what those are.
- Pick the top three items on that list and assign someone to learn each one from Dave. Have them work side by side on those jobs, and put the sessions on the work schedule with dates, the same way you would schedule a PM.
- Turn at least one of those ten into a job plan or asset record update in the EAM every month.
Every organization has a Dave. Do you know who yours is? What happens if he retires in March?
