Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 21, 2011 17:38:24 GMT
Read that report. Interesting info on track gauge expansion as the cause.
|
|
metman
Global Moderator
5056 05/12/1961-23/04/2012 RIP
Posts: 7,400
|
Post by metman on Mar 21, 2011 22:38:49 GMT
Really makes you think about the quality of track maintance! Quite scary actually.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Mar 21, 2011 23:12:19 GMT
Really makes you think about the quality of track maintance! Quite scary actually. Indeed it is. It's a fascinating report though, particularly as it can be construed as making a link between staff morale (p.54) and the ability of staff in safety critical roles being able to actually do their job effectively. A fair link to make, in my opinion. Equally interesting, of course, is that it highlights one of the failures of PPP (or any outsourcing arrangement). Combining things like financial objectives (ie, commercial cost savings/profits) and then setting targets for certain severity of faults and having key criteria judged against them can, even if accidently or due to undue/time pressure, result in them being misclassified in lower severity or being treated as less serious. The interesting part is where the results of an 'indepedent' inspector are compared to the existing faults logged in Maximo (table 1, end of paragraph 51) and states in p.52: "[...] a significant number of existing faults had been incorrectly classified as ML instead of SS, or as MT instead of ML." As p.53 points out, staff morale, time pressures and comptence & training factors are possible causes of those sort of incorrect classifications. To put it into the context of my job (non-transport, but the basic principle here still stands): we're governed by a set of things of Service Level Agreements and as such judged on our performance against a set of criteria. We can, at times, focus so much on those criteria that we are accused of ignoring other faults/failures, just to tick the necessary boxes. When in reality, just as identified in the report, staff morale and time pressures are the real cause of misidentification/treatment of things. I hope that this doesn't fall foul of conjucture about incidents rule, but I hope this comes across as what I find interesting about the report in relation to this particular incident.
|
|