Overhaul6 Impediments to Good SY Support
Introduction
In my previous post, I asserted that the mission of the ship’s crew in any maintenance period is to support the maintenance activity to accomplish the AWP (Availability Work Package). Unfortunately, things don’t always go the way they are diagrammed on a whiteboard. I explain some of the most common reasons why this happens in overhaul.
Factors Inhibiting Good SY Support
There are several things that can impact the quality of crew support for the shipyard (SY): the crew’s workload, poor performance by crew supervisors (“say it isn’t so!), the difficulty of operating in the shipyard, what the crew is asked to do, the crew’s need for “unlearning” their normal ways of operating, and occasionally a lack of commitment some sailors have to providing the support (there, I wrote it).
The crew’s workload increases several-fold in the shipyard, so much so that an overhaul can make a deployment look like vacation. While supporting the SY, the crew is still responsible for continuing training, executing AWP maintenance assigned to them, periodic maintenance on installed equipment, studying for rating exams, maintaining ship safety and security, training to support shipyard events (mostly nuclear ships), cleaning (many more hours in an industrial environment), medical and dental appointments, and end of overhaul certifications that require more training and drills. All of these activities are more difficult because of disruptions to training areas, and additional controls, restrictions, permissions, and conflicts with other work. Shipyard work always has priority, sometimes pushing the crew’s work, training, and qualifications after normal working hours or the weekend.
I was thrown out of an office once for telling a ship’s Department Head that his men couldn’t do something that he sprung on me one morning. It was incompatible with shipyard work already in progress that day. I made the mistake of suggesting that it be done at the end of day shift, which was likely the proximal cause of the ejection. He also threw his hard hat in my direction, but missed.
The extra hours that the crew needs to work in overhauls take a toll on morale, watchstander attention, and performance. When I was the Reactor Officer on a CVN in a refueling overhaul, a shipyard manager once asked me why I was resistant to having members of my department work more than ten hours a day (until absolutely necessary, which it always is!). After all, he and most of the workers in his group were working twelve-hour days. I gave him four reasons:
The workers in his SY group were probably in their mid-thirties with families. On average, mature enough to manage their off-duty responsibilities and get sufficient rest. In my department, the average age was the early-twenties. Humans in that age group don’t manage their off-duty recovery the same way. Even when working eight hours, many come to work after less than four hours of sleep and dehydrated (guess why), just like I did at that age. That physiological state adds risk to the complex SY support tasks the crew has to perform.
The work for members of his group was mostly divided into two shifts and he was staffed for that. He might have been able to add workers as needed. I couldn’t add ANY workers and spreading the department across multiple shifts dilutes departmental supervision, which ALWAYS leads to performance problems.
Few of the workers in his group were studying, getting oral knowledge checks, and taking written examinations and oral boards for their next qualification. The shipyard workers that DO require qualification do it BEFORE the overhaul. Ship’s force doesn’t have that luxury.
NONE of the workers in his group were operating equipment, taking logs, evaluating equipment performance to detect abnormalities, patrolling spaces looking for fires and signs of flooding, attending training EVERY day, and assessing the performance of their fellow watchstanders like mine. The members of my department were part of a “man-machine system.” I actually used that term, something he hadn’t considered previously. The workers in his group worked within a system, but didn’t operate it.
Poor performance by the ship’s supervisors, mainly senior enlisted and junior officers, can be another obstacle to supporting the SY. Nobody EVER says this out loud before an extended maintenance period starts, but that reticence falls away after the umpteenth work stoppage and critique caused by crew performance. Even then, it’s always the shipyard’s fault. Unlike the children of Lake Wobegon, crew senior leadership isn’t always above average. Senior leaders make the difference between good crew performance and a long, painful overhaul. “Officers run the Navy, but Chiefs make the Navy run” as one of my Chiefs put it. In the real world, intelligence and capability are normally distributed. That’s probably another un-discussable, but so be it. I used to think that SY leaders could adjust for poor crew leadership. They just needed Navy staffs to tell them that a particular crew was likely to struggle based on staff observations. I gave up when I realized that this would require a) money that no one EVER wants to spend (for more training, slower pace) and b) different humans on Navy staffs. Neither is practicable. Finger-pointing is cheaper.
Operating in the shipyard is different. The crew operates all ship’s and most temporary SY equipment, but not in accordance with their manuals or under familiar plant conditions. The flexibility the crew has at sea for operations that take place in predictable contexts, with standard system configurations, and experienced operators isn’t possible in overhaul.
Operations in the shipyard involve strange configurations under closer control in very specific contexts with special technical requirements and lots of people watching everything SF watchstanders do. Things can go badly very quickly. New, untrained people are always arriving who missed the “arrival training.” Arrival training is designed to orient the crew for the new environment, but is seldom repeated no matter how many of the original trainees have departed.
Sometimes the support desired by shipyard leaders is not possible for the crew to do well, if at all. It results from special situations and activities and departs from standard work like valve lineups, tag outs, work control document processing, and fire watches. There are many reasons why sailors may not be able to take on some special tasks during an overhaul. Sometimes the crew lacks sufficient supervisors given the other things they are doing. The ship’s leaders may not recognize how thinly spread their supervisors are before accepting the task, but embarking on something new without adequate supervision just screams WORK STOPPAGE. Sometimes the work is too far outside the crew’s training and experience regardless of the supervision available. As Reactor Officer, I became very skilled at saying, “That’s not something we can do.” I even said this to headquarters personnel. They didn’t take it well.
Sailors have to “unlearn” their normal operating modes to support the SY. Unlearning old ways of thinking, doing, and planning always accompanies the learning to do new things. We just don’t talk about it. Normal ops have well-rehearsed procedures, familiar communications, flexibility, intact systems, and no external oversight. Normal ops don’t require much planning because the ship’s supervisors know where to assign people and who needs to be watched more carefully. Abnormalities are recognized quickly and responses are rehearsed until they are nearly automatic. A notable exception was USS JOHN S MCCAIN’s preparation for loss of steering casualties. Unlearning nearly automatic modes of thinking and operating is just as important and difficult as learning all the new things in SYs. When the crew encounters the unexpected, particularly under stress (SYs are stress factories operating on multiple shifts), the crew tends to default to their familiar routines and problem solving. As a dear friend of mine, fellow Engineering Duty Officer (ED) and reader of these posts commented, “I always believed everyone (SY included) would be well served if they began with the understanding that the ship (and its crew) [were] designed to be at sea and therefore nothing is normal.”
Finally, some sailors don’t provide good support (e.g. abandoning their firewatch post without relief, which stops work) because they don’t understand its importance. One carrier Commanding Officer told his crew that the shipyard period they were about to begin was a “maintenance deployment,” but that is rare. It is more likely that even mid-level supervisors of the crew don’t understand their role in keeping shipyard personnel working at their most efficient pace and how that relates to the availability schedule. This attitude usually, but not always, changes after a sailor, his CPO, and his Division Officer experience the wrath of the Supreme Being a superior officer for delaying the shipyard. Unsurprisingly, this produces sailor resentment when they feel the heat for delaying the schedule, but see no consequences for shipyard delays.
Supporting the SY is the crew’s mission during overhauls, but they don’t always do it well. Besides lacking motivation (sad, but true), impediments include workload, poor supervisors, the difficulty of SY ops, being asked to do what is beyond their ability, and the crew’s need to “unlearn” their habitual ways of operating. You can develop strategies to counteract all of them, but ONLY if you are willing to talk about them. I can say no more.
My next post will continue the U.S. Navy ship overhaul theme, focusing on reports by oversight agencies analyzing “what’s wrong” with government SYs. Government shipyard performance has been in the spotlight lately and has been the focus of years of energetic improvement initiatives. The latest is “Perform to Plan” (PTP) for aircraft and ship maintenance (search the title if you want to know more). I’m not going to analyze PTP (Is there a reason why the Veteran’s Crisis Line number appears on the same web pages?), but rather reports that sought to understand problems with ship maintenance and recommend corrective actions, starting with the GAO. Stay tuned.
