This statement seems to be a common when organizations restructure. This is especially true when it comes to maintenance and reliability organizations. New executive management arrives with preconceived ideas of how maintenance and reliability organizations should be structured. They want to change what is existing in the new company they are now managing to match how they were organized at their previous company.
However, this is not a matter of just rearranging boxes on an organizational chart and reconnecting the lines. Before any changes are ever made to an organization, the strengths and weaknesses of the existing organization and the related personnel should be thoroughly evaluated. It would be difficult to change maintenance and reliability processes without first understanding what is currently functioning and what needs repaired/replaced in the existing organization.
It is like going to the doctor. You don’t want a doctor who walks in the room and starts writing out a prescription before conducting an examination. You may accept the diagnosis and try the medicine (relying on the doctor’s experience), but this approach will likely produce no results, so you would likely try another doctor to get a second opinion. If the second doctor took the time to listen to your symptoms, run some tests, and then prescribe a cure, you would likely praise the second doctor and disparage the first one.
It is the same when you change business processes; to be successful, you may engage a consultant (Doctor), conduct an organizational review and carefully plan the reorganization and make the recommended changes. However, if organizational changes are developed and implemented without a thorough understanding (diagnosis) of the existing processes, it is likely the manager will come up with the wrong diagnosis and the wrong prescription for change will be written and problems will languish for several years until the next manager comes in with another mandate to “fix it”.
When maintenance and reliability business processes are changed, they will impact how various departments within an organizations interact. For example, consider how maintenance, engineering, and operations interact. How the organization is structured, who reports to who, and who has a “hard line” or a “dotted line” all impact how PEOPLE will communicate and work together (or not). If a manager makes any organizational changes arbitrarily (without a good diagnosis), they run the risk of creating a dysfunctional organization or at least severely impacting (negatively) the functions and communications of the current organization. This not only impacts the maintenance and reliability organizations, but also how the assets will perform, ultimately affecting the profitability of the company.
Perhaps it is time to give significant consideration to organizational change before it is made – after all, we expect that out of our personal physicians – don’t we?