Humans are creatures of habit. They perform along certain established “known” lines of action, and reject the unknown quantities as potential failures or as unnecessary supplementary effort quite likely to yield identical (and sometimes worse) results. Due consideration for said results may at times ignore the fact that the additional benefits are seen elsewhere by people with a different skillset (for instance, the habit of entering ALL pertinent data in a CMMS merely seems overly long and tedious, whereas the manager wishes to mine the data to yield significant indicators that may or may not be understood at the keyboard entry level).
Changing any one “train of thought” is possible, but even that requires patience and dexterity in managing the change and shifting attitudes towards new goals. Attempting to change several known parameters towards newfangled ways of doing things can thus be readily demonstrated as both dangerous and most likely ineffective in the long run. A change can be achieved in the short run whilst a constant push is maintained to hold up the massive “old ways” but the second we remove the sustaining presence of that force, the old ways will seek to return back into familiar patterns.
How does this affect reliability efforts? Another author (and I seemingly can not readily find the reference at present) calls it the “6 months rule”. People will (albeit often grudgingly) go along with new methods for a period of six months and then, if no obvious results or benefits can be identified from their point of view, these same people will stop believing (if they ever did) that potential rewards will soon appear.
Six months is an exceedingly short time when projects are handled in parallel to regular tasks. The vaunted “trial period” may be shorter than many implementations when execution is handled internally, and contracting out requires adequate budgets and an ever expanding relationship with the contractor to achieve the desired ends within a short time period.
Bottom line: if implementation must succeed, sustained efforts (and money) must be provided to deliver quickly!~
© 2008 by François Gagnon