The number one reason for failures of RCM programs...

Is undoubtedly due to un-mentored facilitators.

Facilitators who, due either to commercial or time concerns, or merely a lack of knowledge, are unleashed with a potentially fatal weapon. And when they inevitably run into problems there is nobody there to assist them through it.

In the worst of cases there is a level of arrogance that prevents people from being mentored correctly. This is tragic for the recently trained facilitators, and for the company who has invested in them.

I have personally seen this time and time again. They are responsible for most brands of streamlined RCM as well as a range of other common mistakes.

However, my most vivid memories of un-mentored facilitators performing analyses comes from my own personal experience when I was first trained.



I made every error in the book.

I started the analyses too high, paralysing the entire group and driving them to despair. I went into far too much detail, driving everyone crazy and needlessly increasing our workload.

I listed failure modes at the wrong level, I had poorly defined function statements, my functional failures were more like failure modes... you name it - I did it.

For those of you who have been down this path you will recognise what I am talking about. All the things that made sense when you were in training suddenly make no sense at all. And one wrong move, like starting too high, and the entire RCM effort is suddenly in jeopardy.

A very painful learning curve. And more than once during this period of learning I recall thinking, "This is garbage, how could anybody work like this?" In fact when I realised I was juggling levels of tolerability in order to get the result I wanted that I realised things were not good.

It wasn't until in the early 1990's when I finally did find a suitable mentor for my RCM work that it all started to come very quickly into focus.

Mentoring is more than personal training. I invested in personal training once and it ended up being someone standing over me yelling at me !!

Good RCM mentoring covers a range of areas where the delegate could not possibly have experience.

Issues like:

• The technical points of RCM. (Correct function statements, failure modes at the right level etcetera, etcetera)
• How to get over common roadblocks in implementations
• Communication techniques for internal transfer of knowledge. 
• Embedding learning (Like how to calculate Detective Maintenance frequencies.)
• Extending RCM through the use of Weibull engineering and other relevant technologies. 

If you are in this situation then I urge you to try to get a good RCM mentor as soon as possible. The bottom line here is that if we do something dramatically wrong, then the best that can happen is a disaster costing millions of dollars in damage. 

it is all good fun doing what we do, but if we get it wrong people really can die, so it is a small time investment to look into facilitator mentoring.