Overhaul5 Crew Mission: Supporting the SY
Introduction
As I noted in the introduction to this series of posts about U.S. Navy ship overhaul, I have lots of overhaul experience: as a crew member (four times), as an Engineering Duty Officer on project teams (three times), managing project teams (four times), and planning overhauls (start to finish twice, various phases multiple times). There is an underlying logic to overhaul not immediately apparent to the less experienced. This isn’t to say that it’s alway logical. Sometimes “painfully stupid” is the only way to describe what happens given the constraints imposed by key players and their incentives. The only way I kept my sanity throughout was by writing about what I observed to understand it better. The blog posts in this series could be considered self-therapy for Post Traumatic Shipyard Disorder.
This post is an analysis of the support that U.S. Navy warship crews need to provide to industrial activities during ship overhaul. Even when ship’s leaders (usually a just a few) understand the support required by the shipyard (SY), communicating it broadly to the crew to convert it to concrete, systematic, repeatable performance is hard. On average, crew members and their leaders lack the experience to understand what comprises good support in an industrial environment. This might be because no one takes a systematic approach to explaining it. This post seeks to address that gap.
Characteristics of Good Shipyard (SY) Support
The two most important missions of a U.S. Navy warship crew in a maintenance period are completing their assigned work and supporting all the maintenance providers (hereafter just SY even though the shipyard can be one of many) so these costly organizations can work at their most efficient pace. For outsiders, “their most efficient pace” can look like a chaotic mess, but that’s another topic.
What is good support for an overhaul? The most important aspects of supporting the SY are skillful communications, adaptation of the crew’s organization as necessary, personnel trained to provide the support, dynamic balance between effectiveness and timeliness for the support, crew procedures modified for the complexity of the overhaul environment, and mature responses to SY demands requests for better support. In more detail:
Good communications within the shipyard. Sometimes different parts of the SY such as production and work control/test aren’t on the same page, which confuses the ship’s crew. On my first assignment to a SY project team, I noted that the test engineers held their daily coordination meetings at the same time as production managers were doing THEIR daily coordination meeting with trade supervisors. Neither test nor production sent a representative to the other’s meeting. I noticed problems by accident when I started visiting the offices of test engineers after attending the daily production coordination meeting. Being the FNG (“Fluffy” New Guy) and and not knowing any better, it seemed like a good idea to ask the test engineers what they had planned for the next several days. Many times, what they planned conflicted with what production planned. That was bad because these two groups needed to be perfectly in sync. My first my response was, “That isn’t what production thinks. They think … You might want to call them.”
After discovering such conflicts several times and helping resolve them, the test engineers welcomed my daily arrival. They didn’t EXACTLY welcome me, but they did yell at me when I returned from vacation (“Where the h*ll were you?”). In the SY, that counts as being welcomed. My visits to the test engineering offices turned into miniature test-production coordination meetings that wouldn’t have happened any other way (long story).
The crew’s leaders aren’t responsible for SY communications, but they are responsible for identifying and insisting on correction of what they perceive as failures in coordination. An example is removing all access ladders (normal humans call these stairs) to engineering spaces, depriving watchstanders of emergency egress. Department Heads either demand better SY coordination or they lock chains around the ladders, sometimes both (no joke). Crew leadership is also responsible for informing SY project leaders when their practices interfere with the ship’s missions, like disorganized material accumulation areas that make it impossible to clean, train or fight fires.
Good internal communication by the crew. The communication linkage from officers to working level supervisors breaks down if any part doesn’t communicate well (this is putting it charitably) or gets distracted by the hundred other “top priorities” characteristic of shipyard overhaul (very common). It is blindingly obvious that poor crew communications can cause significant delays for SY support, yet it happens all the time. As an Engineering Duty Officer (I never figured out whether the abbreviation was ED or EDO, it was never consistent), my production priorities were blindsided more than once by the crew not being prepared for a scheduled SY event. I cracked the code on avoiding this through my daily tours. AFTER making sure that test and production were in sync, I did daily tours of the ship. When I encountered senior enlisted personnel, I would say “I’m not your boss. I’m not telling you what to do, BUT …. did you know that procedure X is happening this week? It might be a good idea to review the procedure with your personnel and ensure you have special tooling ready. If you need something, let me know and I’ll get it for you.” I was met with blank stares until the enlisted leadership learned to trust me. There is no excuse for a crew’s working-level leaders being surprised by ANY shipyard event.
Adaptation of the crew’s organization for the overhaul. A crew’s organizational structure are designed for performing its missions at sea, not in an industrial environment. The ship’s officers must create special groups, offices, and billets (like bus drivers) to effectively support the SY and at the same time accomplish their huge increase in workload. Depending on the complexity of the overhaul, the ship might need to add, drop, and modify offices and billets multiple times depending on the phase of the overhaul. Planning for this isn’t rocket science. Ask the last ship of the class that went through the overhaul what they did. Ship’s leaders can send personnel to talk to their battle-scarred veterans.
Personnel trained to provide the support. This means studying procedures in advance (novel idea), understanding their requirements, doing walkthroughs, asking questions, getting special tooling (which hasn’t been used since the last overhaul so it takes days to find and probably isn’t calibrated), and training to supplement whatever the SY provides (always generic). It’s best to create an office or billet for this preparation because reading and understanding SY procedures is a skill ONLY acquired through practice. Other SY support requires assigning maintenance and work control duties to experienced and meticulous crew experts in SY processes. These people are always in short supply, but the Chiefs know who they are, which is why they complain when they get reassigned to work control duties.
Intelligent balance of effectiveness and timeliness of the SY support. This is a “double secret probation” truth about ship overhaul. Good support requires that it be done without error AND support the schedule. “Support the schedule” is a tricky criterion because SY personnel seldom tell the crew how long it should take to isolate and drain systems, perform required maintenance, and process work control documents. Faster support is always better for the schedule, but what SY leaders REALLY want is support without error-induced work stoppages and delays. Delays from crew errors are worse than slow support.
Crew procedures adapted for the complexity of the overhaul environment. One example is pre-event briefings. Outside the shipyard, crews seldom do briefings before routine procedures because they are frequently performed by experienced personnel. One or two new people can be watched closely or given less important tasks until they learn. Inside the shipyard, nothing is routine, many people are new, and the new people are difficult to supervise closely because there are more of them than skilled supervisors, always the crew’s most limiting asset. It takes many work stoppages and critiques time for the crew’s leaders to recognize this, change their briefing procedures, conduct training, and do the beatings provide reinforcement necessary to actually USE the revised procedures.
Mature responses to SY feedback about the crew’s support. Communicating to the crew’s leaders that the support provided is inadequate is fraught with peril. Of course, no SY supervisor would EVER say this directly because ship’s leaders are grumpy enough about the indignities of overhaul. Complaints about inadequate SY support are like dumping gasoline on that smoldering fire. There are many mature ways to react to feedback, but a decidedly juvenile approach is to kick all the workers of the offending activity off the ship. A CVN Chief Engineer (CHENG) did this once to an activity that my organization was funding after a supervisor told him that they wouldn’t be able to finish the work without improved crew support. My response was to ask him, “CHENG, do you want the work done? This is the only group I am funding to do it. Just let me know because no one else is coming.” He let them back on after more face-saving gestures to protect his ego. Come on, man!
Conclusion
In overhaul, a U.S. Navy warship’s normal mission of maintaining combat readiness is replaced by providing the best possible support for the SY. Completing the overhaul on time while maintaining safety is everyone’s priority. This is especially true for the people that don’t want to be there because they joined the Navy to “blow stuff up.” Supporting the many maintenance providers involved in the overhaul requires skillful communications within the ship and with the maintenance activities, crew organizational adjustment to manage the support work, personnel specifically trained to provide the support (showing up is good, but not sufficient), a dynamic balance between providing effective and timely support, crew procedures adapted for the complexity of the overhaul environment, and non-juvenile productive responses to requests or demands to improve the support.
In my next post, I’ll discuss the principal factors that inhibit the crew’s ability to provide the SY support I just described.
