When A Plan Comes Together

You know the feeling, the project you’ve been working on over the last five or six weeks is coming to fruition and you’re not quite sure how, but somehow you are going to deliver, on time and within budget.

When you look back there are a number of factors that have contributed to its successful conclusion. Production planning, research, resource planning, purchasing, individual skills, line management and teamwork all have their part to play.

Within our business at Tecnico it is imperative that we apply a professional resource managed approach to every project. To not do so would almost guarantee a failure of some part whether it is final delivery, product quality, operating costs or worse still client dissatisfaction. Of course, this would be the same for any business.

Just this week we have been drawing to the end of a machine refurbishment project and as always the engineering gods have contrived to throw as many spanners in the works as possible just to make life that little bit harder.

It’s at times like this that the human element really comes into play; there is no substitute for individual knowledge, skills and resourcefulness. And for me it’s the individual characters and their ability to synergise their unique strengths within the team that really pays dividends.

Back to the job in hand and for those of you old enough to remember the original series I liken this period in a refurbishment project to a scene from the 1980’s television series The A-Team.

A group of very different individuals working feverishly to design rebuild and manufacture their way to a successful and satisfying conclusion, drawing upon not just technical ability but their own individualism and personal spirit to see it through and effectively save the day.

Every member of the team contributes whether it is cleaning and packing, mechanical engineering, PLC programming or dare I say it just having the ability to lift heavy things. To remove any one of them is to guarantee failure. For us failure is not an option.

To conclude it’s very easy to get wrapped up in quality systems, planning and resource management, but never forget the human element, they have the ability create problems granted, but when the chips are down they really do have it within their power to save the day.

As I finish this piece we are currently concluding final testing so with my best ‘Hannibal Smith’ impression I would just like to say “I love it when a plan comes together!”