Articles tagged Assessments

Helpful Summary Tips on Qualitative Assessments and Facilitation

Qualitative assessments are used in various applications, including asset management, risk management, human reliability analysis, and customer surveys. The usefulness of any qualitative assessment is a function of design, analysis, and administration. Facilitation plays a pivotal role.

Facilitators should understand the strengths and weaknesses of the qualitative assessments we facilitate and design. Qualitative assessments measure the opinions, attitudes, knowledge, perceived behaviors, observations, beliefs, and experiences of individuals who use a system the most. The correct understanding is fundamental as we lead participants to solutions that are created, understood, and accepted by all. [Read more…]

by James Kovacevic 1 Comment

Assessing Your Asset Management System

What You Must Know About Assessing Your Asset Management System

Often times organizations want to determine where they in their journey of asset management. This usually takes place in the form of benchmarking or assessing their asset management system against the standard. Before progressing any further, it is important to understand the difference between an assessment and an audit; [Read more…]

by Greg Hutchins 7 Comments

Risk Assessment Challenges

We have conducted hundreds of risk assessments in a number of sectors from homeland security to pension funds to Parks and Recreation departments. We have a number of hard lessons learned. These are some common mistakes we have made and seen: [Read more…]

by James Reyes-Picknell Leave a Comment

The Need for Maintenance Management Assessments

Conventional consulting approaches begin with assessments to determine your current state of affairs, judge what’s good and bad about it, give it a score, provide a long list of recommendations and then build an improvement strategy based on the outcome.

Strategy development is normally carried out by a select leadership team and then the change is rolled out to lower levels in the organization. This approach has served well for a long time and it is at the outset of almost any major consulting engagement.

It is useful when comparing sites among each other, but is there some sort of award for being best? Usually not. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

How to Assess Your Reliability Program

“How do you know so much about our program?” was a question the quality manager asked after reading the assessment report. The assessment took one day with eight interviews.

The reliability that results is going to happen whether or not the team designing the product or production line deliberately use reliability engineering tools or not. The elements of a product or system will respond to the environment and either work or fail.

While working at Hewlett-Packard I had the opportunity to conduct reliability program assessment of about 50 product divisions. One hypothesis related the number of reliability tasks the team actively used would correlate to their warranty expenses.

That worked to a point. [Read more…]

by Fred Schenkelberg 2 Comments

To Change the Reliability Culture

Have you ever wished your organization would work together to achieve a reliable product? Not just a few individuals and a heavy reliance on the reliability team to focus on highlighting and fixing reliability issues.

Some organizations tend to react to reliability issues. Prototype testing and field returns continue to surprise the team. The worst organization fall into finding someone to blame. Better organizations set to work to understand the problem and quickly resolve the issue. Some have better ‘fire departments’ than others.

Responding quicker is not really the best way to deal with reliability. [Read more…]