PART V
Assessing and Closing Processes

Assessing and Closing Processes in maintenance differ from those used in project management because maintenance typically never ends. Maintenance will end when the system is retired or replaced. The joy of celebrating success will be elusive for quite some time, because a look back to see if you met all your goals might be 5 or 10 years down the road.

Of course, you may be managing a project or large enhancement under the umbrella of your maintenance team. You can thus fall back on standard project management best practices, such as conducting lessons learned sessions, when closing out your project or large enhancement. Such activities are thoroughly explained in the PMBOK^® Guide and in other sources.

Part V provides four ways that you can take a look at your past maintenance efforts. Your company might already require you to use one or more of these methods, but you might want to consider all of them, and their benefits, and perhaps use them to provide the information you need to improve operations.

The following diagram lists our four Assessing and Closing Processes. The first two are combined into one chapter.

The first two assessments, Reviews and Audits, can be performed at any time. The Customer Survey can be performed quarterly, while the Annual Closeout will obviously be performed annually. Most likely these milestones will naturally be set by your company’s end-of-year cycle. At that time you can do the following to simulate an end (end of year) and improve for the next beginning (next year).

Chapter 20: Peer Reviews and Formal Audits

Presents the power of periodic peer reviews—either formal or informal peer reviews. These reviews provide a comparison to past years and sharing of best practices to foster continuous improvement.

Also, presents an approach to prepare for, and participate in, the dreaded audit. Even though employees do not look forward to audits, audits provide a vital function to organizations.

Chapter 21: Customer Survey

Presents a systematic approach for soliciting customers for feedback on the delivered service while simultaneously delivering information on the service delivered to the customer. Customer satisfaction is a major metric since maintenance is a service.

Chapter 22: Annual Closeout

Presents the activities to close out the fiscal year and begin anew, including financial closeout, team member performance appraisals, applying lessons learned sessions, and updating/renewing the Service Level Agreements (SLAs).