Operations and maintenance staff are the unsung heroes of many facilities. If they do their jobs well, nothing breaks, and their hard work goes unnoticed. And even when they do their jobs well, things can still break, simply because that’s the nature of heavily used equipment and aging facilities.
Most community members aren’t aware of the subtleties of factors like mean-time-to-failure and planned maintenance – they just see that something isn’t working. And when the O&M team is remembered for what’s not working instead of how responsive they’ve been to community service requests, getting budget approval to address deferred maintenance or gain efficiencies can be next to impossible.
