Moneyball Reliability or Home Run Hero Reliability?

by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

  

“Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (ISBN 0-393-05765-8) is a book by Michael Lewis, published in 2003, about the Oakland Athletics baseball team and its general manager Billy Beane.

Its focus is the team's analytical, evidence-based, sabermetric approach to assembling a competitive baseball team, despite Oakland's disadvantaged revenue situation. A film based on the book starring Brad Pitt was released in 2011.”¹

The basic idea is using stats like On Base percentage and Slugging percentage, the A’s built title contending teams with 1/10^th the player budget as teams like the Yankees and Red Sox whose rosters were filled with drama educing Home Run hero’s.

Like the A's Moneyball techniques, there are many reliability statistical methods available for you to guide your actions and activities.

“You must work on the vital few things that influence results while ignoring the trivial many things that do not materially alter performance.  You must know the vital few things to correct to get big improvements for your operations.  This concept is true for reducing cost, improving quality, or solving business problems.  Build your list using dollars not the number of problems.

Solving problems requires a breakthrough in your thinking to get improvements.  You must separate the vital few details from the trivial many items.  Vital problems are difficult to solve and produce good results.  Trivial problems are fun to solve, never put your reputation at stake, and produce few results.”²

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J. W. Anson said:

Fixing major problems on the Pareto list requires effort, time, and perseverance.  Solving vital problems puts your reputation at stake on high profile tasks for big gains.  Winners work on the vital few problems.

Losers work on trivial problems without getting big gains. Working on trivial problems makes pretty exhibits without chances for failure.  Pareto distributions assign eye-catching activities on trivial problems into last place.

Working on the vital few problems results in major gains on the most important projects!   This is an important competitive key for any manufacturing operation.

Use the Pareto principle with these action steps: 

• Sort problems in descending order from the most important to the least important—use $’s cost whenever possible.
• Start work on the top 10% to 20% of the things which produce the vitally important improvements.
• Ignore 60% to 80% of the things on the bottom of the lists—they’re the trivial problems producing few gains.
• Solve the really big problems at the top of the $ list—then sort the list again to revise the priorities.
• Use continuous improvement programs to chip away at the big ticket items for a never ending stream of changes.

Fix the vital few problems for important gains.

Pareto principles result in: Ranking problems in the order of their importance (use money rather than occurrences) for establishing work priorities.  Winners in an organization work on the vital few problems that change the results for the business.  Losers in an organization work on the trivial few problems, which produces no gains.  Set-up your breakthrough plans and make important changes for improvements in your area using Pareto principles. <sup>2


Here is an example of a Pareto Chart</sup>

Will you use Moneyball techniques (like Pareto’s 80/20 rule) to become a reliability contender or will you count on your hero’s to deliver the results?

Footnotes:

1)  Wikipedia: Moneyball

2) H. Paul Barringer, Pareto Principle http://www.barringer1.com/anvil_files/anvil04.htm

Is there a reliability intelligence failure at your organization?

Is there a reliability intelligence failure at your organization?
by Terrence O'Hanlon, Publisher and CEO Reliabilityweb.com and Uptime Magazine

I just finished reading an article that reported on a recent Pentagon study about our battlefield effectiveness and performance in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The report states, “that U.S. troops didn’t understand the basic realities of society, culture and power structures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and couldn’t explain what they were doing to skeptical populations.”

“We were slow to recognize the importance of information and the battle for the narrative in achieving objectives at all levels,” according to a May 23 draft of the study.”

“In operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere,” the report reads, “a failure to recognize, acknowledge and accurately define the operational environment led to a mismatch between forces, capabilities, missions and goals.”

The report considers these issues less a strategy failure than an intelligence failure.

Think about that.  The United States military arguably has the best strategies, techniques, technologies and tools available yet by ignoring things as important as the local culture and history, they were not able to use the resources to their advantage. They suffered intelligence failures.

In addition, the U.S. soldiers and leaders were unable to effectively “tell the story” of the mission to the locals in a way that they would not only stop them from undermining U.S efforts but might actually get them to “buy-in” and “support” the mission goals.

The Pentagon thinks that understanding culture and using an effective narrative is so important that one solution you will likely see in the future will be a sociologist embedded with U.S. forces in order to get a better understanding of local culture.

Does any of that sound familiar to you?

While your maintenance reliability program likely does not enjoy the level of resources available to the U.S. Military, you probably have a good strategy, good techniques, good technologies and tools.

Do you have a full understanding of the workforce culture? 

Are you and your team members able to tell the story (the narrative) of your reliability mission so that operators, purchasing and management “buy-in” and “support” the goals? 

As a maintenance reliability leader, you must be an effective Reliability Sociologist to ensure you understand the culture of the workforce you will be working with and the story that your own team is telling.  That is how you will win the battle and the war!

Please comment on these points.