Work Priority Article

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Do you Work On What’s Important or What’s Urgent?

A number of times I have heard management or self help gurus saying ‘we need to work on what’s important rather than what’s urgent’. The only issue is that when a problem gets more urgent, it also gets more important. It all gets very confusing. How can I ignore one problem that will bite me this week and work on another that won't affect me till next month, when I have a whole month to fix the second problem? In the real world there is often not enough time to do both. What makes a non-urgent job more important than an urgent job? The answer is the level of likely final consequence of doing nothing about it. If you are not convinced, think about the US Gulf Oil Disaster where there were known non-urgent problems with Deepwater Horizon rig blow-out preventer. The consequence of not doing anything about these problems has been huge. This article will give you a method of deciding when you should be giving your attention to Important problems over Urgent problems.

A more typical plant example might be a pump that is likely to fail soon that would lose you two hour production if it fails. This pump problem may not be as important as another machine with a much more minor problem if this machine had no spares and would stop your plant for 3 months if it failed. You can observe the difficulty of making these decisions in most Computerised Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) with the chaos that often surrounds work order job priority systems. Everyone thinks their job is Important and wants it done now. In well run systems there is a process that determines how important a job is but their is still often confusion and arguments trying to balance between Urgency and Importance.

The big challenge for many maintenance organisations is to get out of being too reactive. Reactive means doing what’s urgent rather than doing what's important. Condition Monitoring people who work in reactive organisations often face problems because CM is all about fixing problem before they become too urgent. They often have their condition reports and repair requests ignored. They get comments like “just tell me when machines are about to fail and I will fix them then. I don’t want to know about all these other problems”. These other problems may not be urgent but they may be important.

The first step to defining the Importance of a problem or opportunity is to define its Urgency. Two ways of defining Urgency are related to Deadlines or to Equipment Condition (there are other ways). Equipment Condition predicts a future plant failure, which can be treated as a less certain deadline. The table above gives a method of Ranking Urgency. If the consequence of not taking action was similar for two separate problems, then the Urgency Ranking between the two is also the Importance Ranking between them.

As suggested, the second factor to set the Importance of doing a task is the likely consequence of not taking action. Most people in industrial plant understand consequence ranking as it is a standard tool in Risk Assessments. The consequence ranking in the Importance Decision Matrix below takes into account Health & Safety, Environmental, Production & Quality and Financial issues in a very structured way. This decision matrix below allows you to rank the importance of two tasks of different Urgency and different Consequence to see which is most important. This Importance Ranking system gives a simple 0 to 7 rank that covers all situations. The suggestion is that Importance should drive actions rather than just Urgency. The idea is to make very sure that large losses are avoided, even if you have to accept some smaller losses to achieve this.

You will note in the above Importance Decision Matrix that if you take the Consequence Ranking and the Urgency Ranking and add them together it gives you the Importance Ranking. This may not seem logical but is technically accurate due each Consequence Ranking being 10 times higher than the previous and the Urgency Ranking very roughly having a similar 10 times relationship (to maths people this is a log-log graph relationship). If you use this ranking system, remember each Importance Rank is 10 times the importance of the one below.

The realities of scheduling actions from a large group possible tasks can be complex as there may be lots of factors to take into consideration. Having concepts and structures for ranking task Importance gives a good foundation for scheduling.

One thing this model does not address is putting Urgency and Importance on tasks that help avoid future risk or drive improvement. Management needs to ensure these activities are given the appropriate level of Importance against all the current problems and issues that compete for time and resources.

Article by Peter Todd - IMRt Facilitator NSW

PS. The diagram to the right gives more details of Defect Condition categories. Looking at the Warning category you still have a lots of flexibility of when you can do the job and Severe would be when you are getting closer to possible failure. Defect Condition categories are not just about alarm levels or simple criteria. Looking at more complex issues like rates of deterioration or possible external factors often need to be taken into account.