Quality & Safety...true constraints in the Facility Maintenance Enterprise

Often in the Project, Turnaround and Facility Maintenance world we emphasize the importance of managing the traditional elements that impact our environment. While scope, time and cost are extremely relevant to enable us to understand, track, report and ultimately provide a baseline for conventional analysis, it is becoming increasingly critical to establish systems that champion Quality and Safety.

Many organizations have recognized that quality and safety are key to an organizational success; so...why does it seem like these components are sometimes regarded as complimentary. Too often management groups, committees and individuals feel leveraged to make compromises without understanding potential outputs that sometimes lead to catastrophic events.

Over the years we all have either been intimately involved and/or can recall events that changed our perspective and influenced our ability to manage ourselves and our environment. Understanding this, it is, ultimately the responsibility of the entire organization beginning and ending with each individual to embrace Quality and Safety management. This idea of being ambassadors of change highlighting the relavence of risk is an essential component in organizational  maturity. There will always be, and always should be, debates regarding the cost of quality, marginal analysis, cost benefit analysis and risk. As it is the focus on each elemental component without losing sight of potential impacts of short and long term risk that will enable improved managment of true sustainable performance.