Learning rapidly to improve performance is a superpower in ship overhaul. Crew members will make errors because no one enters a prolonged maintenance period knowing what they need to know. The problem for the crew’s leaders isn’t what they don’t know about learning from error. It’s what they know that isn’t so.

Fifth installment of Undeniable Truths of Overhaul: Errors require corrective action, but don’t be stupid. Corrective actions are stupid when they ignore systemic sources of error, add additional controls, and are unreflective.

This is the fourth installment of Undeniable Truths of Overhaul. In it, I discuss two:

• SY workers do care about the schedule

• High performance is different in overhaul

This is the third installment of Undeniable Truths of warship overhaul. It is better to accept and act on them before the “piano of reality” drops on your head.

This is the explanation of Undeniable Truths of Overhaul 9-12: the crew needs to adapt quickly to the SY, senior leader visits disrupt work, the crew is the weakest link of overhaul, and supervision is the crew’s most limited resource.

This is another post on Navy ship maintenance realities. I restate the fundamentals of Navy ship maintenance (knowing, planning, doing, and testing) and do a deep dive on Class Maintenance Plans.

Navy ship depot maintenance is expensive. The only way to significantly lower repair costs is to do less of it. This isn’t good for long term ship material readiness or budgets. Neither is espousing rubbish about ship repair.

Achieving acceptable performance in Navy ship depot maintenance is hard. Diagnosing the key problems when things aren’t going well is even tougher since so many factors that contribute to delays aren’t under the control of any one Navy activity. Ship lifecycle management poor performance has many components. Depot maintenance is just one of them.

This is another post in my series devoted to ship overhaul. I continue examining Navy ship maintenance through GAO publications by responding to comments and digging deeper into causes of ship maintenance delays.

I examine Navy ship maintenance performance through the lens a GAO statement based on numerous GAO reports. Spoiler alert: after all those reports, things aren’t getting better.

The focus of this post is what can interfere with the support the ship’s crew should provide to the SY in an overhaul.

Providing work and test support in overhaul is challenging for the crew. This post defines good shipyard support.

Overhaul is hard for the crew because of the knowledge gap between ship’s force and shipyard managers about the work and schedule.

This is the first of a series of posts explaining why sailors don’t like ship overhaul. I use the analogy of getting a filling, routine teeth maintenance, as an illustration.

While they can seem like chaos, overhauls have three major parts: setting plant conditions, repairs, and testing the repairs. These parts can be divided even further. Some aspects of overhaul are subtle or fiendishly counterintuitive.