Corrective Action Program Best Practice 27 – Screen for Corrective Scope That Solves More Than One Condition Report

You’ve got an emergency diesel generator out of service for a maintenance repair. The work goes fine, the crew reinstalls the covers, pulls the lockout tags, and runs the required surveillance test to prove the diesel starts and loads as designed. Everything checks out. Diesel’s back in service, condition report closed.

Three days later, in the same week, a second condition report on that same diesel comes up for correction — a different deficiency, unrelated to the first, legitimately its own unique issue. So the crew tags it out again, does the repair, pulls the tags again, and runs the exact same surveillance test again to prove the diesel still starts and loads as designed.

Nothing about either condition report was wrong. Both were real, both were correctly written up as distinct issues. But the diesel was taken out of service twice instead of once, got tagged and untagged twice instead of once, and got run through a full retest twice instead of once — and nobody caught it until the end-of-week schedule review, when someone asked the obvious question: why didn’t we just do these jobs together.

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About the Author

Nathan Ives is President and CEO of StrategyDriven, and serves as an executive at a nuclear and energy AI software company, where his role has grown to encompass COO-level functions and AI solution design. A former U.S. Navy nuclear submarine officer and NRC-licensed Senior Reactor Operator, he brings over 30 years of experience spanning nuclear operations, Big 4 consulting, and enterprise leadership across nine countries. He holds an MBA from Kennesaw State University and a B.S. in Physics from the U.S. Naval Academy, and serves as Executive Director and Board Member of the PanAmerican College Fund.

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