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T-Week Meeting engagement, work schedules posted early, material availability, personal responsibility for being prepared and staying safe: It adds up to better teamwork. And better teamwork is what helped Work Management improve last year at USA fleet member PPL Susquehanna.

In the last quarter of 2014, Team Susquehanna experienced multiple weeks of schedule adherence at or above 90 percent. Like improvements made in other Focus Areas, this happened thanks to months of incremental changes in behaviors and engagement, which began to have a positive impact on Team Susquehanna.

Maintenance Manager Joe Rodriguez first noticed the changes last summer at the Station’s 0600 Production Meeting. Complacency was replaced with a new attitude. Representatives of multiple disciplines were more energized to resolve emergent work issues and figure out ways to finish the day’s scheduled activities. It continued through the summer and into September’s planned U2 Turbine Outage, which came off without a hitch.

These behavior changes – a commitment to getting the work done safely and with quality – continued through the end of 2014. By the end of the year, work schedules were being posted in the shops two weeks ahead of work and Work Week Managers were exercising their responsibilities as owners of the work week. The proof that it’s all working? Four weeks of schedule adherence at or above 90 percent.

“The key is to continue the improvement and sustain it,” said Mark Schwiker, who at that time served as Online Work Management Manager. “We are educating the departments on their roles and providing clear expectations to Engineering, Maintenance, Work Management and Operations. Where we need to see improvement now is maintaining the critical work scope from the time we freeze it at T-16 down to when we start the work week execution.”

2014 Accomplishments:

• 50 of 52 System Health coded work orders were completed in the last Unit 1 outage
• Process to add work scope after freeze is being consistently enforced; fewer work items added after schedule certification
• Improved leadership engagement, team behaviors and better response to emergent work
• Consistent performance over Q4 2014 achieving Schedule Adherence greater than 92 percent