Chapter 6: Plan
Jobs reach the crew unprepared
Protect the planner’s time, route interruptions, and connect job plans to staged materials. Useful when the planner spends more time responding to today’s problems than preparing tomorrow’s work.
A maintenance manager’s field manual · Ivan Getov
Fix the System
Give the crew a system that lets the work get done.
For maintenance and reliability leaders who keep seeing the same problems return: jobs that are not ready, schedules that break, and close-outs that teach nobody anything. Connect the operating rules behind the work, from the first notification to the next job plan.
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Find your starting point
Which problem keeps coming back?
You can start with the problem in front of you. These are four routes into the book, not a complete table of contents.
Chapter 7: Schedule
The weekly schedule keeps changing
Connect the scheduling meeting, operations coordination, frozen-zone policy, and break-in decisions. Useful when a published schedule does not become a shared commitment.
Chapter 9: Close Out and Learn
The same planning mistakes return
Set a close-out standard and use review routines to turn execution feedback into changes to job plans and maintenance tasks.
Chapter 19: Schedule Compliance Improvement
Schedule compliance keeps slipping
Trace missed commitments to causes such as break-in work, materials, access, and scope estimates. Use the playbook to choose a response to the cause instead of hiding misses with extra slack.
Who will get the most from it?
Maintenance managers and reliability leaders responsible for how work moves through the plant. Planners and supervisors who need clearer handoffs, prepared jobs, and feedback they can use. Operations partners who help agree access windows and protect maintenance commitments.
If you need a blank worksheet for a meeting today, start with the free companion toolkit. If you need to connect those worksheets to roles, decision rules, and review routines across the maintenance cycle, that is the work the full book takes on. It is a management field manual; equipment-specific instructions and work authorization still come from your site.
Read the maintenance guides → Work through jobs that are not ready, schedules that break, and failures that return before choosing your next step.
Start with the weekly schedule
Try one part of the system.
These existing tools are free to use. No email required. The book connects the working artifacts to the wider maintenance system.
01
Check planning readiness →
Assess request quality, job-plan detail, planner capacity, and feedback before loading the week.
02
Build the weekly schedule →
Work through realistic available hours, ready backlog, operations windows, and priority rules.
03
Investigate missed commitments →
Explore the systems behind schedule compliance and choose an improvement path.
Bring a working artifact to the next planning conversation:
The complete field manual
Connect the tools. Install the operating rules.
Use the free toolkit for the worksheets and checklists. Read Fix the System for the thinking behind them and how the stages of maintenance work fit together.
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