Overhaul15: Undeniable Truths of Overhaul 19-20

Introduction

This post discusses just two Undeniable Truths

• - UT 19: Schedule matters to shipyard (SY) workers

• - UT 20: High performance is different in overhaul

This post is longer than average because, in UT 20, I went beyond stating the issue and provided my vision of what high performance in SYs entails. I feel strongly that readers of this blog will benefit from the additional detail. I opted for brutal honesty, which is my practice for all Undeniable Truths. Gird your loins before reading further.

Undeniable Truth 19: Schedule matters to SY workers

It is common to hear members of a ship’s crew in overhaul opine “Schedule doesn’t matter to SY tradesmen because they get paid by the hour.” I would be a rich man if I had a nickel (okay, with recent inflation, probably a dollar) for every time I heard this. Leaving aside the imbecility of forming opinions unburdened by knowledge, this thinking is wrong for three reasons.

First, SY managers, not paid by the hour and with fewer job protections than sailors (at least in private SYs), DO care about the schedule. A lot. So do their bosses. To believe that “tradesmen don’t care about the schedule,” you have to believe that what a person’s boss thinks has no impact on them. This may be true in narrow cases when a particular worker has a valuable skill that is not easily replaced. Even then, it doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. Union membership is not a factor.

Second, it assumes that workers who have low productivity or who are “soldiering,” aren’t noticed or can’t be influenced by their managers. Soldiering, with apologies to the U.S. Army, is a term for working at the slowest rate that escapes accountability (Taylor, 1911). SY managers and trades foremen have many options for combatting low productivity, all beyond the scope of this post.

Third, if SY workers really had no interest in working efficiently or at their best speed and managers lacked tools to change the practice, how would ships ever deliver from overhaul? Some actually do.

* Taylor, F. W. (1911). Shop management. American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Undeniable Truth 20: High performance is different in overhaul

This is one of the most important Undeniable Truths of ship overhaul.

Years ago, there was a focus on achieving high performance in “day-to-day operations” by Navy crews. The avowed aim was to improve crew performance by focusing on the high-leverage practices and attention that were necessary for operational excellence. The logic was sound: sustained high-performance results from disciplined adherence to high standards for training, qualifications, auditing, formality, records/logs, cleanliness, procedural compliance, and problem identification and follow-up. Each of these areas had specific attributes that could be observed and objectively graded by the crew and outsiders.

The blind spot in day-to-day operations excellence was that it did not include the overhaul environment. Is high performance in overhaul possible? Of course, but it requires significant changes to operational practices and mindsets. This is because so much of the crew’s work is significantly different in overhaul. Some work is similar: tagouts, work permit processing, sweepers, maintenance, and operations. What’s fundamentally different is: the volume of work, unfamiliar procedures, system responses, and need for temporary systems.

With rare exceptions, crews enter overhaul completely unprepared for how their work changes. Operational experience outside the SY doesn’t prepare them. SY’s provide pre-overhaul training (lots), but SY trainers can’t teach sailors how to manage the changes in fundamental crew responsibilities: operations, maintenance, cleanliness, and work control. They can, but it would require a different approach to pre-SY training. Not more hours, but training differently.

High performance by the crew in SYs is based on disciplined adherence to fundamentals, but oriented to the shipyard environment. Many situations illustrate this, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll only describe one.

Ships must prepare for and execute procedures much differently in a SY. Most procedures and complex activities performed by the crew outside the shipyard are: repeated regularly, conducted by experienced personnel or with just a few new watchstanders closely monitored by experienced personnel, require few valve manipulations, and employ standard communications. System response is easy to predict and observe. Special evolutions like loading stores and ammunition are planned days to weeks in advance, have special watchbills, employ additional supervisors, and are extensively briefed.

In SYs, all procedures are unfamiliar. Many people at once are new to watchstations. SY procedures and systems are not part of the ship’s qualification process. The consequence of the fusion of installed and temporary systems is that SY procedures have system responses that are difficult to observe, take longer, and require more valve operations than the crew normally experiences. This is mind-numbing for the crew.

Merely reading a procedure to prepare for doing it is insufficient. Appropriate preparations, particularly for first-time use of a procedure, include:

• walkthroughs and briefs (often difficult when temporary systems are ready only moments before starting);

• understanding and being able to identify how fluids flow during the procedure;

• deciding whether and where to station additional supervisors and monitors with specific responsibilities;

• necessary communications for coordination and emergencies;

• planning for stricter procedural control;

• whether to allow and how to manage parallel operations;

• when to permit and how to conduct watch reliefs for long procedures that span meal hours of shift changes; and

• responding to the unexpected (“What will we do if …?”).

Heresy alert: after making these decisions, crew senior leaders should review them with the SY personnel who have seen them performed many times.

Training for operations, doing walkthroughs, and holding pre-evolution briefs are 100% crew responsibilities. This means that the SY can’t tell the crew not to do them or how to do them. They may complain because doing these things subtracts the best mechanics and supervisors from other processes like work control. SY leaders may note the complaint volume decreases if the crew consistently performs the procedures well.

Supervisors can adapt how they do walkthroughs and briefs in the SY. They should have a standing order for consistency and defense against “You’re delaying the shipyard” accusations (they’ll come regardless, toughen up). The standing order could give senior enlisted watch supervisors the option of conducting short oral exams with key watchstanders on station before declaring readiness to start a procedure. Many similar actions can be included in the standing order.

SF supervisors (the crew’s scarcest resource, UT 12) will need to spend time planning for procedures. Their senior leaders must spot-check to ensure the planning is occurring. Senior leaders need to be trained for this role. The crew’s supervisors need to decide how to allocate watchstanders for operations that they’ve never done, which watchstanders need less supervision, and which bear close watching (or should be sent on a soda run).

Critical communications have to be invented for each SY procedure because they are never part of the procedure.

Tip: assigning the most junior personnel on the watch team, the normal practice underway, is a terrible idea for the first use of a procedure in the SY. The guardrails that let crews get away with this practice underway are absent in the SY. Crews that insist on making their least experienced personnel critical links for communications for unfamiliar procedures should expect to spend a lot of time in critiques.

The actions outlined above are illustrative, not exhaustive. They require training to understand, opportunities to practice, and discipline to perform well (shocker!). This suggests that some amount of dedicated, pre-SY, training is essential. Merely assigning a ship to a “maintenance ISIC” or continuing the practice of assigning operational missions to the ship until a few days before the availability start date will be insufficient.

An unrecognized consequence of “day-to-day shipyard operations are difficult to do well” is that crews known by their ISIC as “weak” outside the SY (they DO know) may fall apart under the stresses of an overhaul. If the crew doesn’t perform day-to-day operations well under the straightforward and simpler conditions outside the SY, they’ll get blown up in a maintenance environment. Complexity and stress ruthlessly expose weakness. It’s still the SY’s fault (UT 8), however.

Other types of operational excellence that must be rethought for the SY environment include:

• verifying system lineups

• processing a higher volume of work control documents

• managing the crew’s significantly increased repair work

• qualifications

• transition from SY operations to at-sea mode

I lack the space to address these issues in the detail they merit. I’ll save that for a future book.

Conclusion

I described two Undeniable Truths of overhaul in this post:

• UT 19: Schedule matters to shipyard (SY) workers

• UT 20: High performance is different in overhaul

For UT 19, I made indirect arguments because I don’t read minds. I have observed lots of behavior suggesting that SY workers care greatly about schedules.

For UT 20, I outlined some differences between the operational environment and the SY that impact the crew, which is a little like saying that Joan of Arc was impacted by a wood burning near her. Not content with merely identifying differences, I described a vision of what high performance entails in the SY for executing SY procedures.

For crews to enter the SY performing at a high level for a maintenance environment, Immediate Superiors in Command (ISIC’s), type commanders, and SY trainers would need to develop new approaches to pre-SY training and operations. Crews would need to learn fundamentally different understandings of their core, “absolute” responsibilities: pre-evolution preparation, operations, maintenance, cleanliness, work control, and SY support. This is unlikely to happen.

Operators dreaming about and preparing to blow stuff up will always prioritize operations over maintenance. Maintenance preparation and performance only get on their agenda when they go badly. Instead of seeking to fix this, I recommend something approximating the Carrier Team One approach, which in my paraphrase is: focus on processes, not people, and give people who have experienced the problems some space to make things a little less terrible.

I welcome all perspectives on the Undeniable Truths. Please leave comments here or on LinkedIn.