Preparing for the Unexpected?

Mose Ramieh, III

Most of us as facility managers are extremely busy with what is right in front of us. This simple fact challenges our ability to prepare for the unexpected.

In Steven Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People he discusses the need to develop the habit of spending most our time in Quadrant II (Important and Not Urgent Tasks i.e. Planning/Preparing). This is the quadrant where we can be the most effective at improving our organizations and ourselves. But as I mentioned earlier we spend most our time in Quadrant I (Important and Urgent i.e. Crisis management).

So what are the tasks that we should be working on to prepare for the unexpected and how can we work in Quadrant II?

Often I see or hear about the "unexpected" event and know full well that it could have been planned for or simply prevented.

1. The firing range where a soldier was hit in the face by a ricochet. Unexpected? Not if you saw the numerous reports of bullet holes in the windshield of cars in the parking lot.
2. The main chiller just went down because of a blown fuse and the building is becoming so uncomfortable that people may have to be sent home. Unexpected? Maybe, but a spare fuse on hand and perhaps you avoid a crisis.
3. Water leaked into the main electrical switchboard and shutdown the whole building. Unexpected? Well not if you come to learn after the fact that one of your maintenance staff was using a bucket to catch the water.
4. A medium voltage cable just failed and has several buildings without power. Unexpected? Sure, but have you done all the predictive and preventative testing you could in an attempt to find the problem before it failed?

So what steps can you begin to take to minimize crisis management and begin to "Plan for the Unexpected"?

1. Don't ignore the "bullet holes". Safety is so important in what we do everyday. To turn a blind eye to what is, after the accident, so obviously wrong.
2. Examine your critical systems and operations. Are there areas that lack redundancy? If so what preparations can be made in the event of "what if?"
3. Qualified month walk thorough of space and equipment rooms. Identify and eliminate the "normalization of deviation". Just because something has always been that way does not make it right. If it feels wrong or sounds wrong it most likely is. Go with your instincts in those cases.
4. Utilize predictive and preventative maintenance (PdM and PM). No maintenance plan is a guarantee against unplanned outages. But they are the best defense against the question, "What could we have done to prevent this outage?" Everything we could. Remember a maintenance activity is better than inactivity.