Bad maintenance practices tend to sneak into the way things get done. Here are three more to guard against:
Bad Practice #29 — Making Maintenance a Low Priority Until Something Breaks.
Prioritizing maintenance immediately following a crisis probably means management is making an emotional reaction rather than restoring maintenance to its proper role. Once things cool off, don't let maintenance again be a low priority until crisis hits.
Bad Practice #30 — Structuring Maintenance as a Reactive System.
If equipment is misbehaving, in comes the cavalry and they might even prevent a failure. This is the tail wagging the dog. The measure of a maintenance department's effectiveness is not how fast it reacts to problems, but how well it prevents problems in the first place.
Bad Practice #31 — Structuring Maintenance as a Corrective System.
If it breaks, we fix it. If it ain’t broke, we don't. The misconception is that it's efficient to spend maintenance resources only when "necessary." This mindset ignores the fact that the typical downtime incident is orders of magnitude more expensive than the costs of prevention through consistent maintenance.
