Things Just Worked in the Navy

As my career in industry has progressed, I often reflect on my first 5 years out of college which I spent in the nuclear navy.  Having worked in industry now for over 20 years, I still marvel at the way things just worked in the navy and how much thought and effort must have gone into that to make it work.  I don't know what the average age of the workforce is on a submarine but if I had to guess, I would say it is probably about 25 years old.  When I left the Navy I was 27 and had the equivalent of about 15 years worth of experience in industry compacted into my 5 years of the navy. 

Life on a Submarine

As with most things, it's not as exciting as it might be on TV or at the movies.  It was just a lot of dedicated professionals doing their jobs.  For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to focus in on the powerplant operations as this is most applicable to what I want to discuss.

The US Navy operates in a fashion which would be labelled Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) by today's literature.   Think of this as the Operators are the Maintainers or "If you break it, you will also be the guy fixing it."   This drives a very high level of operator care for the equipment because (1) operators are knowledgeable about the equipment and (2) if it fixing broken equipment is going to cut into your sleep time or other personal time, you would really prefer that it doesn't break at all.

In my role as a production leader (operating shift supervisor), I was called the Engineering Officer of the Watch.  My job was to oversee powerplant operations and meet the demands of my customer, the Officer of the Deck who was overseeing the needs of the whole ship.  The job went something like this and it does not vary much by individual or ship:

I would arrive about 20 - 30 minutes before the official start of the shift and I would spend 10 - 15 minutes walking through all the workspaces, speaking to each of the workers who was about to go off shift to find out what was going on and I would look at their log sheets and put my initials on them next to the last set of readings.  Then I would go to the control room.  I would look at the status boards and the instrument panels there and make sure they were consistent with what I had seen outside.  When I was happy with that, I would greet the person I was relieving and formally say, "I'm ready to relieve you."  He would then give me a complete rundown of the plant's operating conditions which would include:

• Current operating conditions
• Any procedures currently in progress
• Broken or out of service equipment
• A review of any activities that had gone on in the last shift
• Anything he new needed to be done on my shift
• Ask me what questions I had.

At the end of this exercise, he would state, "I am ready to be relieved." And I would respond, "I relieve you."   Then I would make a formal statement to the three control panel operators in the control room (who had been listening to the entire exchange) that I had relieved the other guy and they would acknowledge this by saying "Aye".  The off going supervisor would sign the logbook and hand it to me and I would sign just below him.

Then we would operate the plant according to the operating procedures.  I would coordinate maintenance activities, PM, operating procedures, etc.   I would respond to orders from the Officer of the Deck or the helmsman and do things like send fresh water to a specific place, control the speed of the ship, bleed oxygen into the atmosphere, etc.  There were standard routines that were carried out at regular times.   For example, on Sunday night between midnight and 6 am the on shift crew would audit the tag out log by physically verifying every tag and removing the closed out sheets from the previous week from the book and filling them for record-keeping purposes.  There were routine samples that were taken, processed, and trended at specific intervals.  We would review lessons learned from other plants or do training exercises in the evenings.  We would drill frequently to practice abnormal operations and responding to "casualties" (problems in the operating plant).

At about the four hour point of my shift, I would trade jobs with the outside shift supervisor for about an hour.  He would come into the control room and take over and I would go outside and do his job for an hour.  During this time I toured the spaces (work floor) and reviewed everybody's logsheets, spoke to each of the operators, reviewed cleanliness and workmanship, etc.  As I did this I would verify a few log readings in each area.  For example, I would check the oil pressure on the most remote bearing of a main turbine and I would see if what I saw matched what was written in the logs.  I would initial people's logs (to show that I had looked at them).

When I was done with my shift and I had been relieved, I then went up to the Officer of the Deck and gave him a briefing of what was going on in the plant.  The off going Officer of the Deck and I would then give the captain of the ship an operational update and then I would go a similar update to the ship's Engineering Officer (my boss).

In addition to the routine things, we would drill frequently to practice abnormal operations and responding to "casualties" (problems in the operating plant).  This trained everybody on what to do, how to work together, and how to use your head to apply plant knowledge to the situation.


The things that really made this work were:

1. Clear roles and responsibilities.  Not a document or a list but trained in habits.
2. Everybody did their job and respected their peers ability to do theirs.  People expected others to do their jobs and pretty much everybody did.
3. Supervision was in the field and formally audited what was happening in a very simple way, by initialling log sheets and written approvals on procedures, etc.
4. Everybody documented what they were doing in a written log so there was always a good history to analyze when something went wrong.
5. Training and competency assurance.  We trained all the time and assessed each other's competency.  Qualification/certification is done by peers who are already qualified/certified.

Why do we have such a hard time with this in industry?  I'm not sure.