09/03/2026
Your condition report backlog has four hundred open items. Somewhere in there is a cosmetic leak, an eight-month-old jumper that's still "temporary," and a procedure step operators quietly skip every shift. On paper, all four look the same. One line, one priority code, one owner. In practice, they are not remotely the same problem.
Here's the fix: screen every condition against four designations. Operator workaround — a temporary fix standing in for something that's not working as designed. Burden — anything adding real time or difficulty to normal work. Main control room deficiency — anything degrading control room indication or operability. And high risk — elevated consequence potential, independent of the other three.
Tag for these, and a single workaround stops looking like a minor inconvenience. Twelve of them stacked on the same system is an operator managing around a broken control scheme from memory.
One facility did this and found eleven open workarounds concentrated on a single unit — more than double any other unit in the plant. Those reports had existed the whole time. Nobody had ever counted them, because nobody had tagged them.
Designate these four categories at the point of entry, and the concentration of real risk stops hiding in your backlog.
Full best practice is linked below.
Read the full article: https://www.strategydriven.com/2026/09/03/corrective-action-program-best-practice-23-designate-workarounds-burdens-and-deficiencies-before-they-hide-in-your-backlog/