Reflections ... What is Live Outage?

What is Live Outage?

This question was asked in our recent townhall. I tried to answer it, but wanted to follow-up in written form to better answer. -and- GE Gas Power gave me a gift this week with an email devoted to Live-Outage . I encourage you to read the email that was shared, the linked articles, watch the videos, etc. to learn about all things Live Outage. For a condensed summary, below are the basics.

You may be thinking, “I have seen this before – tiger teams, productivity tools, field procedure simplification. What makes this different?” Good question. I give you my take.

First, Live Outage has more focused energy throughout the various GE stakeholders than I have ever seen in past GE field initiatives. The investment money is significant. The rigor of planning-executing-reflection is continuous. The leadership of the Live Outage effort is people with real field experience – former field engineers and superintendents are at the helm.

Second, the field via APM is embedded in Live Outage. The improved tooling, the lean work design, and the simplified process content was developed by our field leaders and piloted by ~10 of our teams in the ’21 Fall. We hosted 4 Live Outage training sessions this January at our LDC. We now have 40+ teams trained on Live Outage being deployed this spring on 7F HGP & Majors.

Third, Live Outage has the capability to wed safety, quality, delivery, and cost (SQDC). In times past (and maybe still present), our Field teams expressed tension between safety and productivity, the “cost and schedule pressure” dynamic. While watching our Field teams in the LDC this January, I saw the light switch flip. We now see Live Outage pillars as bringing SQDC into harmony, ex: Milwaukee cordless tools that make the job both safer (by removing cords) and more productive (by removing waste of setting up air hoses and power cords).

Finally, for me, Live Outage is about making the outage experience better for all stakeholders, including our craft. It’s about assigning the best craft team to an outage with better tools, better work design, and better processes. It puts the craft on outage center stage – the mechanic is the star of the show.

The craft mechanic being the star is what has me most excited and bought in on Live Outage, for it aligns with our APM purpose = We empower the people who power life.

— Jake