Schedule compliance: the number nobody wants to publish

Schedule compliance is the proportion of work scheduled for a week that was actually completed in that week. It is usually the lowest number on any maintenance report, which is exactly why it is worth publishing: it is the honest test of whether the plan means anything.

How to count it

Freeze the schedule at a fixed point, usually the end of the previous week. Count the jobs on that frozen list that were finished by the end of the scheduled week, divided by the jobs on the list. Work added mid-week does not count in either the top or the bottom.

The freeze is the whole discipline. Without it, the schedule quietly becomes a description of what happened rather than a plan for what will.

What low compliance is telling you

• •The week was overloaded: no allowance was made for the reactive work that arrives every week
• •Jobs were scheduled before they were ready, so the crew arrived and could not start
• •Nobody protects the plan when something loud happens
• •Estimates are wrong, so four jobs planned for a day were never a day of work

Schedule to less than full

Look at what proportion of hours went to unplanned work over the last six months and leave that much of the week empty. A schedule built at 100 percent of available hours fails on the first callout, and after it has failed twice nobody believes it.

Only schedule ready work

A job without its parts, access or permit is not ready and must not be in the week. This is broken constantly by supervisors hoping the parts arrive, and every time it happens the crew loses hours and the week shifts.

Where to publish it

Inside the maintenance team, weekly, alongside the reason the misses happened. Not to a board, where it will be misread as incompetence when it is usually a symptom of an unrealistic plan or an unprotected one. It is a working number, and it works best when nobody is being judged on it.