PM compliance, and how to stop it being gamed

PM compliance is the proportion of scheduled preventive jobs completed within their window. The window is the whole measure. Without one, a job done four months late still counts as completed, and the number becomes a report on how many jobs eventually got closed.

Set the window as a share of the interval

A common convention is ten percent of the interval. A monthly job gets about three days, an annual job gets about five weeks. This scales sensibly and it stops the argument about whether a weekly check done on Monday instead of Friday is late.

The formula

PM compliance equals jobs completed inside the window divided by jobs scheduled in the period. Count the job as scheduled in the period it was due, not the period it was closed, or late work quietly disappears from both months.

100 percent is a warning sign

Sustained perfect compliance almost always means one of three things, and only one of them is good.

• •The schedule is far too light for the team, which is worth knowing
• •Jobs are being closed without being done, which is worth knowing urgently
• •Due dates are being moved before they go late, which is the most common one

Check the third by counting how often due dates change. If rescheduling is common and invisible, your compliance number is a measure of how good people are at using the reschedule button.

Pair it with something it cannot fake

PM compliance on its own is gameable. Two companions make it honest.

• •Evidence rate: the share of completed preventive jobs carrying a photograph or a reading
• •Findings rate: the share of preventive jobs that found something and raised follow-up work

A programme at 98 percent compliance that never finds anything and never attaches a photograph is not doing preventive maintenance. It is closing jobs.

Report it by building and by trade

A single site-wide figure hides everything. Broken down, it usually shows one building or one trade carrying all of the slippage, and that is a resourcing conversation with a specific answer rather than a general complaint.

What to do about the slippage

Before adding people, check whether the schedule was achievable. Add up the estimated hours of scheduled preventive work and compare with the hours the team actually has after reactive work. In a surprising number of programmes the plan was never possible, and no amount of compliance reporting will fix arithmetic.