Reflections...Closing Spring Outage Season

APM Team,

This week, the last week of May, is bookended by the Victoria Day & National Patriot’s Day holidays in Canada and Memorial Day in the USA. It marks the end of spring, school, little league baseball, and brings the attention to summer, pool parties, and vacations. It also usually brings to closure the spring outage season.

While we are starting to see the tail end of the spring outage season, we still have a significant number of craft working a significant number of hours. Just this past week we still had over 2K craft working 114K hours on almost 200 jobs. That is a lot for us at this time of year.

This spring has been challenging. Over a 12 week stretch beginning the first week of March until the end of May, we have averaged 2500 craft working 140K hours on 200 jobs per week. That equates to an average of 56 hours / week / craftsperson for 12 consecutive weeks. And with that continuous stretch of high volume work comes additional stretch on others – more job setup, job briefings, payroll, billing, etc. The entire organization has been running at high capacity for 3 months.

What am I thinking?

  • WOW! That’s a lot of volume. We must be tired.

  • What can we learn from this outage season?

  • How do we recover and refresh for the fall?

  • When do summer camps start for the kids?

  • Where are we going on vacation again?

What are you thinking?

Next Friday, 06/04, we will have our H3 “All Heads, Hearts, Hands” Event that will allow us to share “what we are thinking”. This will give us a great opportunity to reflect, share, and learn so that we can improve. I exhort you to join us next Friday. I also encourage you to submit what you are thinking along with any questions in advance using our Slido link.

Finally, I leave you with one of my cherished Memorial Day traditions. I will listen to this fifteen minute podcast read by Jocko Willink titled Don’t Forget to Smile. Whatever you do this weekend – get a little exercise in (maybe you’ll do a Murph), watch a little baseball or softball (Go ‘Stros!), or spend some time in the yard or pool or grill, I pray you have plenty of smiles, and you remember those who gave all for our liberty to enjoy life with those we love.

And for those 2K craft who are still working in the Field, and for those who support them 24/7 … THANK YOU!

May we all enjoy a safe, healthy, blessed weekend.

Communications TeamH3 Event, Spring Outage Season, Memorial Day, Thank youComment