The Glory of Repair
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This post is about innovation and entrepreneurship. In a way. It’s about how maybe, just maybe, we put so much emphasis on innovation, that we have left some important values behind – like the value of keeping things running and doing a good job of maintenance to avoid throwing things away. I actually started my career in what was called, at the time, “repair engineering”. Our group supported the 23 national service centers for telecom equipment. Electronic units (they happened to be pulse-code modulation regenerators, for those who care) from underground and telephone pole equipment locations were shipped to these service centers where they were repaired, tested, and returned to a ‘new’ condition. These days, those same units would be thrown away. There could be a separate blog post (or two, or three) on the highly negative ecological and social effects of disposing of electronic components, so there is merit in repairing, especially if the non-economic costs of disposal are considered. I’ll keep the focus here, however, on the value of maintenance in and of itself. Aside from my own praise of maintenance, there was recently a “Festival of Maintenance” at the Museum of London. Its mission: The Festival of Maintenance is a celebration of those who maintain different parts of our world, and how they do it, exploring and recognising the often hidden work done in repair, custodianship, stewardship, tending and caring for the things that matter. To get a flavor for this, I found this interesting content at Makerassembly.org. Note: The “maker culture” is “a contemporary culture or subculture representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture that intersects with hacker culture and revels in the creation of new devices as well as tinkering with existing ones. The maker culture in general supports open-source hardware” (Wikipedia). A lot of maker culture is about making new things, and in many Western contexts, that’s making gadgets and gizmos that are fun for a while but generally then gather dust until eventually thrown away. Making and fixing useful things happens, but often in less visible places — farmers repairing and modifying their equipment, making and fixing in rural areas, and around the world local manufacturing and hacking and reuse where it’s the only option to save and sustain life. (We used to do more of that here, making do and mending, but of late that’s declined as consumer goods became more affordable, and often cheaper to replace than to repair — or even complex items designed to be thrown away.) We felt that making and local manufacturing of essential items would be valuable, even here in the UK, whilst imagining both dystopian and utopian possible futures. Measures of economic success are geared around innovation as well. Ever wonder why the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is called Gross and not Net? The reason is that it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. You can find out more about the economics of repair versus replace in a very insightful article (Patch-up Job) in an October 2018 issue of The Economist. In this article you will also find an interesting discussion of the “right to repair” laws in the US and some similar proposed legislation in the EU. So: how does project management fit into this? As PMs we may want to work on the creation of something new, innovative, creative. Maintenance seems so … bland … compared to this. Indeed, maintenance is often dismissed as drudgery. But wait…maybe there are innovative ways to keep things up and running! Perhaps it would not be so bad to work on a project that breathes new life into an older building, network, or piece of software. Going back to my own 'ancient history', as a repair engineer, we ended up doing many innovative projects in the area of repair, including my favorite proejct: introducing a touch-screen based automated test system for these regenerators, back in 1982. Yes, you read that correctly - we were deploying touch-screen interfaces decades before smartphones. The outcome of this project - the test system - facilitated the repair, saved many difficult-to-troubleshoot units from the trash bin, reduced the repair cost and sped up the turn-around time. You can have your innovative cake and maintain it, too! Let me hear from you: What ideas or experience do you have in managing ‘maintenance’ projects and making that (important) work attractive, compelling, and interesting? |
