Its the time again!!

I go through this cycle at least twice in 3 years, yup unit shutdown. Its the most interesting part of my career here. Many of the items worked on for the past three years, either get executed in this shut down, or we can see the results during this shut down.

I still remembers one of the remarks made by previous MD when we spoke about the shutdown in 2008. He mentioned that in this pressing moments, I have to made the right decisions, there and then. What I do is, I inspect equipment, any deviation, abnormalities, I should be able to report back. And at times not all problems has a solution. And that is when all eyes on you. Management wants to know the options, contractors need to know what they have to do, and I must be able to advise (with my limited amount of knowledge). Of course we are backed up by consultants, but some of it just need a good judgement call. 

I stumbled right at the beginning this time. What happened is some of my problematic equipment is having some issue for quite some time. The equipments are not in the shut down fixed scope. If I want to ask for my equipment to be opened, I need to raise emergent work request (EWR). The fixed scope was frozen few months back, and in between that time and the D-day (few days ago), there are lots of EWR raised and rejected as well as approved.

We are on the execution mode already and as normal, more EWR will be raised. So happen, my colleague had to raise the first one during the execution mode. The EWR will need management's approval, and it does not even get passed our dept. head. So this person decided to back off, not even tabling it out to the Steering Committee. I had some pressing issue with my equipments too. I prepared the paper, submit to my SV, only to be told it was not meeting certain requirement. Operations are already pressing me to submit the paper, it was not economically justified, but it still needs to be done.So after some discussion, we table it out anyway...

It was nerve wrecking, mine was the first EWR during execution mode. The Steering Committee was gentle with me, though there were some questions that I was not able to answer, my request was partially approved, with minor compromise on the detail scope. I may be able to push for more have I decided to rob in another dept's support during the session, which never cross my mind in the midst of the chaos. Yesterday my dept's head sent out an email to remind us and the other dept that we were supposed to rob in on areas for improvement for the next EWR. And this morning, the section head of the other department replied quite lengthy to second the reminder, which made me feel bad as I am the example of not to be followed.

Well, I got praised for getting the first EWR approved, but I was also the one that caused the email war right from yesterday till today....haish....but as I said, it is interesting, different shutdown gave me different lesson, different ways looking at people and different outlook on some stuffs that I was blinded about. And I am always glad for it!!!