Corrective Action Program Best Practice 29 – Set a Deadline, Then Stop Digging

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You assign a cause analysis for an equipment deficiency, and your team gets to work. They gather data, interview the people involved, and produce a draft. Someone asks a good question, so the team goes back for more data; the draft is revised, then revised again. Months pass. The corrective actions the team eventually proposes look almost identical to those in its first draft, except that the equipment problem has now sat open and unresolved for the entire time. Then the failure happens again. Only then does anyone say what everyone had known all along: you should have acted sooner.

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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.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 28 – Don’t Solve It Alone When Someone Else Already Has

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A pump in your plant fails, so your team tries one fix. It does not hold, so they try another. Down the hall, a work crew makes a procedural error that other facilities eliminated years ago, and the investigation starts from a blank page. Meanwhile, a manager faces a complex, high-risk decision and works through it from first principles, never asking whether a dozen other organizations had already faced the same decision and written down what they learned. In each case, the answers existed the entire time, freely available to anyone willing to look them up. Nobody looked, because in this organization’s culture, if it wasn’t invented here, it doesn’t exist.

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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.

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

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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.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 26 – Follow the Process, Not Just Your Memory, From Screening to Resolution

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A condition report comes in regarding a pump seal with a slow leak. It’s minor-looking, and the screener has seen dozens like it. Confident this is routine, he/she waves it through without assigning a trend code, without checking whether the same seal issue has shown up elsewhere in the plant or fleet, and without flagging it for the condition review the procedure actually requires for this type of finding. It feels efficient. Six months later, three more pump seal leak reports surface on the same pump family. Only then does anyone connect them — and by that time, what would have been caught as an emerging pattern after the first report becomes a full root cause investigation with a scope four times the size that a timely trend with organizational notification would have driven months earlier.

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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.

Corrective Action Program Best Practice 25 – Check for Duplicates Before You Create a New Condition Report

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Three different shifts submit condition reports on the same leaking valve within a single week — each written by someone who has no idea two colleagues already reported it. The maintenance team ends up scheduling three separate work orders for one repair, this month’s trending report shows three “issues” where there was only one, and nobody notices the pattern until someone asks why valve failures suddenly look like they’ve tripled.

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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.