Balancing the O&M Triple Constraint

Have you ever felt a feeling of disconnect between the wants and needs of the three major stakeholder groups within your plant?

The stakeholder groups I am referring to are the Management, Operations and Maintenance disciplines which could be thought of the O&M triple constraint. Similar to the universal project triple constraint of time/scope & budget, the O&M triple constraint is intended to gauge and manage the health of the business objective. The aim of the Operation and Maintenance (O&M) institution, as I understand, is to manage the efficiency, reliability and sustainability of process assets. For without reliable assets and ancillary systems, production would be limited or nonexistent. This directly impacts product deliverables and contractual agreements.
In order to maintain healthy relationships a certain balancing act is required to manage all stakeholder group initiatives and deliver value driven performance. The lynch pin to maintaining cohesion and communication between disciplines is the alignment of Planning and Scheduling.
The maintenance department is responsible for developing and management of an integrated system that, ultimately, reduces reactivity and short notice outage work. Desired outputs include increased productivity and base crew size scaled to meet long term objectives. A valid Planning & Scheduling program coupled with configuration and continuous improvement frameworks will enable craft personnel to work more effectively. In order for this to be realized it is essential work be validated, scoped, planned, prioritized and scheduled in accordance to an O&M structure. The evolution of this framework or structure will be the development of value added PM and PDM methodologies. The foremost outputs include increased reliability resulting in lower risk of asset downtime.
From an operations perspective, communication of work to be performed is essential to timely repairs. For the most part it is the operations group that will identify work and initiate a service request based on their expert judgment. It is important that clearly defined CMMS protocols are established and communicated to qualify consistent results.
Proportionately important is the management group which supports each element and component of the framework endorsing the value of all disciplines to provide unambiguous results. This support resonates with discipline craft persons as compensation should be within industry standards, hopefully better, work assignments and training allow people to grow and a flexible schedule is promoted.

The end result is a group of people who are transparent and understand the opportunities and constraints of each individual discipline well enough to leverage opportunities for performance driven results.