The Maintenance Guru Introduction

Why this blog exists

Maintenance has evolved constantly as machinery has grown more complex and new technology has emerged, yet in many industries its maturity still lags well behind what's possible. This blog is written for anyone genuinely passionate about maintenance — covering principles, methods, processes and enablers, and how they play out differently across industries and contexts.

A career built around maintenance

The perspective behind this blog comes from a career that started operating plant and turning spanners in the Royal Navy submarine service, before moving into planning, scheduling and maintenance improvement at the coal face. After 23 years in that world, the next step was joining a major manufacturer at the forefront of servitisation and the early development of predictive maintenance — work that included direct responsibility for its research and development.

Formal training as an RCM facilitator and reliability engineer, alongside a BSc in Computer Science and an MSc in Information Systems, tied the IT and engineering sides of that experience together. Discovering Systems Thinking and Systems Engineering during that academic study was a turning point — a way of reducing the risk of engineering project failure by opening up new approaches within what is traditionally a reductionist discipline. That combination of design-and-support engineering perspective and hands-on operating experience is also what led, later, to co-founding a software company built around extracting key knowledge from maintenance data to automate the process of optimising it — the work that became IronMan®.

What to expect

Expect anecdotes and real stories alongside the theory — what worked, what didn't, and how to avoid the failures. Some posts may take the form of video where a concept is easier to show than explain, and there's an open invitation for others in the field to contribute or take part in interviews. The aim throughout is to separate hype from reality and cut through the fog around what actually works in maintenance technology.

A wider goal

Part of the ambition here is making a genuinely fascinating and rewarding career more visible and more attractive to a broader range of people. Engineering has a leading role to play in moving the world away from carbon-based energy, and maintenance engineering specifically is what keeps performance and safety intact while reducing environmental impact — work that matters for how economies keep developing sustainably.

This will be a conversational, fortnightly blog built on the belief that no one person knows everything. Reader experience and feedback are expected to shape where it goes next — starting with the question in the very next post: what is maintenance, and what is it actually for?