Planned work: the clearest signal of how professionally your maintenance is run

The work order arrives at seven in the morning. The parts are on the shelf, the permit is drawn up, the task steps are written out, and the right tradesperson is already walking to the job. Twenty minutes later the pump is back on line.

Or the work order arrives at seven, and nobody is quite sure what size seal is needed, the permit office does not open until eight, and three people spend half the morning hunting for a drawing. Both crews logged the same job. Only one of them was planned, and the gap between those two mornings is the whole story of this metric.

What it actually measures

Planned work is the percentage of your total maintenance labour hours that went through a formal planning process before anyone started. A job counts as planned when a planner has worked out the labour, materials, tools and safety requirements, assembled them into a job-plan package, and handed that package to the crew before work begins. Everything else is unplanned.

How to work it out

Planned work (%) = (Planned hours × 100) / Total maintenance labour hours

In a week the team logs 1,115 total labour hours, of which 667 were spent on formally planned jobs.

Planned work = (667 × 100) / 1,115 = 59.8%

More than 40% of the week's hours were unplanned. Closing that gap toward the target means more jobs prepared in advance, and fewer people improvising on the floor.

Why planning is a multiplier, not overhead

The objection to planners is always the same: that is a person not turning a wrench. The arithmetic says the opposite, and it is striking. In a poorly planned shop, a technician's hands are actually on the work only about a third of the day; the rest goes to searching, waiting and walking. Put a planner in front of that crew and hands-on time climbs toward a half or better, which multiplies what the same people produce by something like half as much again. The documented cases are almost hard to believe: a thirty-strong crew, once its work was properly planned, did the output of forty-seven, as though seventeen extra people had quietly turned up, all for the cost of a single planner. A smaller, well-planned crew routinely outproduces a larger one that is flying blind. That is why planned work is the earliest reliable sign your people are being used well, and why tracking it weekly catches the slide back toward reaction before it becomes a crisis.

What good looks like

Best-in-class performance is greater than 90%, and the working floor beneath that is to have at least 80% of each week's work planned before it starts. If your site sits well below the mark, treat the gap as the opportunity it is and set an incremental target each month rather than chasing 90% overnight, because the climb itself is where the productivity is unlocked.

Where it can mislead you

• Planned and unplanned work must always sum to 100%. If they do not, something is being miscategorised.
• Include overtime hours in the total, and if those hours went on planned jobs, in the planned figure too.
• A scope change discovered mid-job belongs on a separate, unplanned work order, not charged back against the original planned one.
• Watch the most common way it stalls: planning simply cannot stay ahead of the crew, the team runs out of prepared jobs, and it drifts back to the unplanned backlog, or a supervisor pulls technicians onto a pressing emergency. That is why a healthy planned backlog sits behind a healthy planned-work figure; without the queue, the number quietly slides.
• It tells you whether planning happened, not whether it was any good. Pair it with the estimating-accuracy measures to see the full picture, and keep the definition tight enough that it cannot be massaged to look good.

Planned work is the single clearest signal of how professionally a maintenance operation is run. It does not measure heroics or hours clocked; it measures preparation, and in maintenance, preparation is very nearly everything, because it is the one move that makes every other hour worth more.