When it comes to turnaround management, we've all heard of using "lessons learned." But according to Joe Jackson, process quality assurance for LyondellBasell, the phrase should be "lessons to be learned."
"The first issue is, typically when a turnaround is over, everybody's ready to move on," he said. "Have a facilitator to work through the process so that things can be captured, organized and formalized.
"Typically we say 'lessons learned.' What I wish the language really said was 'lessons to be learned,' because until you do something different, you haven't learned a lesson. You've only reinforced the experience you've had previously, and you're doing the same thing over and over."
"You could call it either 'lessons to be learned' or 'lessons observed,' but until you've changed the practice or the behavior, you haven't learned anything," agreed Lawrence Crow, turnaround manager for Westlake Chemical, speaking on a panel for the Downstream Engineering & Construction Canada Conference & Exhibition 2018 held in Calgary, Alberta. "How many times do you go to a 'lessons learned' meeting after a project or after a turnaround, and 80 percent of it's the stuff you wrote down the last time?
"It's a challenge, and you have to challenge yourself and challenge your organization as to how to do it differently so you don't run into those problems, and that's one of the hardest things."
"You want to pick someone to go out and do the post-turnaround critiques," added Tommy Simoneaux, turnaround coordinator for Westlake. "What you need to do is look at that from different perspectives.
"What we've done in the past is taken people from operations and from the turnaround group as well as contractors involved in our turnaround, let them interview and capture the data, and then put it all in one unique form. So we're getting information from three different perspectives versus just one perspective."
"In order to get really good, honest, effective feedback after a turnaround, you really need a true, sincere approach that you want to learn from these lessons and not go after a witch hunt or try to figure out why certain things went the way they did," said Preston Howard, turnaround manager for Ascend Performance Materials. "I think that sincere approach is incredibly important, and I think just as important if not more is true leadership driving and developing those feedback sessions.
"If you're just trying to drive effective feedback from the middle of an organization or the bottom of an organization, you're going to have a real hard time doing that. But if it can be prewired where company leadership is essentially demanding good, honest feedback sessions and they're driving that expectation down, I think you'll see a lot more sincere participation and engagement in that."
"I try to get people to build their list of observations as the event happens, so that they can bring that to the closeout sessions and have that memory-jogger of all the different things that they had thought about where there were opportunities to do better," added Jackson.
"That's absolutely key," Crow echoed. "We actually send out a lessons log that sits on a company share drive, and we encourage daily observations, learnings and opportunities to be put on that log. It's been slow to change that culture, but how [else] do you capture it when it's real?
"The instructions are, 'If you have a thought of a learning or something that should be captured and it's already on the log, still put it on there,' because if I get the same comment from six different people, then obviously it's real."
One example of such a problem often encountered immediately in turnaround planning is material handling, added Howard.
"The idea of ordering whatever material you have and getting it on-site, getting it kitted by work order and then getting it issued out to the jobsite based on your look-ahead schedule -- that work process, to do that well and to support the dynamics of a turnaround, needs focus, leadership and planning," he explained. "It ends up failing you if you don't put in the upfront investment the one time you need it most."
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