Aircraft Maintenance Technology

JAN-FEB 2018

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PROFESSIONALISM FIRST A LITTLE BIT OF BUILDING THE case and understanding the challenges. The business and work environment is changing fast. This has a profound impact on how we do things both at work and at home. We'll focus on work. Technology is an important part of this impact. All around us technology is influencing every aspect of life. The cultural and sociologi- cal influences are all around us. This has gone to the extent that some folks like to take vacations away from technology. More and more people seek out the tech-free getaways "getting totally off the grid." This is telling as we are seeing the impact of fast-paced change and 24/7 overload of information. There are literally weeks where the very same thing, maybe a process, a policy, procedure, or an aircraft part can change a couple of times or more. There are times when people are trying to get used to the changes from last week and here this week, it changes again. It's important to understand the why and the impact of all this. TECHNOLOGY AND DECISION MAKING Technology is a terrific tool to solve prob- lems and sometimes solve problems that we didn't even know we had. We have a love/hate relationship with it. However, from a human factors point of view, tech- nology is providing choices. Choice is something we were all told "it is always good to have choices, the more choices the better." And boy, did technology ever prove that right. We have many choices these days. There used to be three ways to do things, now there are 300 ways. Maybe a little exaggeration but you get the gist. Think of it with this example: Take orange juice. There used to be a choice to drink orange juice. You got oranges or someone did and you had yourself some good old-fashioned OJ. Today, you have OJ with pulp, without pulp, small pulp, big pulp, with calcium or without, sugar free (yach!!), or you can have orange and grapefruit or mixed with pomegranate. You can have OJ that's good for your joints or good for your cold or good for your eyes and on and on and on. They should have one OJ choice for headaches that you get just reviewing all these choices. So yes we got what we wanted, lots of choices. Now we are tasked with making the decisions about the choices. Recently I heard about a study that a really smart person did. They put a few people in a room and asked them to choose two items out of 15. Then they put a similar type group in the same room and asked them to choose two items out of four. Guess who was faster? By far the folks that had less choices. They were not stressed out and they had more time together because their decision making was simple and fast; they were done before the time was up. So they spent it chatting. (No smart devices were allowed in the room, by the way!) WHY TEAMWORK TODAY IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER BEFORE Refine the process. Reduce the choices. It will make stronger decision making and a stronger team. By Bob Hobbi

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