Instead of Extinguishing Fires, Concentrate on Prevention: Preventive vs. Reactive Maintenance in IT

In IT, as in most other industries, a fine balance exists between proactive and reactive system management and maintenance. Companies often employ different strategies for different systems or assets. However, one thing is common in many instances: teams often have limited resources available, and need to do more with less. This means that they often need to run to extinguish fires, rather than concentrate on long-term goals and strategic objectives. 

Let’s first define the different approaches to maintenance and system management in the context of IT. After that, we’ll discuss how organizations can transition from reactive maintenance to prevention. 

Here are three of the most popular maintenance strategies in IT: 

• Preventive maintenance aims to eliminate failures by regularly inspecting equipment or systems and addressing issues before they turn into problems. Preventive maintenance can be based on calendar time (service a given system every week and check for malfunctions), or on usage time (service the system every 100 run hours).

• Predictive maintenance is a sub-type of preventive maintenance. Its goal is to predict exactly when a breakdown could occur, so that maintenance can  be done before that. In it, you use monitoring tools to detect anomalies and predict when a given asset needs to be serviced. Single-pane-of-glass (SPOG) is ideal for predictive maintenance, because you get all your data from different tools into one UI. The team that works on a given issue is able to look into it from different angles, and everyone can use the tool they’re most familiar with.

• Reactive maintenance means that teams fix problems as they arise, including system downtime. Downtime is costly and its consequences for a company can be disastrous, both in terms of a brand’s image and of financial losses. Nevertheless, reactive maintenance has its place in your global management strategy, and is useful for non-critical assets that are easy to replace. 

Both preventive and predictive system management and maintenance are proactive in nature. For both approaches, it’s necessary to analyze data from different software tools—f.e. on uptime, availability, resources used—and make informed decisions based on that. And that’s where ZigiOps can help: by integrating your software tools, you get full transparency into your data and workflows. This allows you to easily shift from the big picture to the details, and enhance both root cause analysis and defect resolution. 

Reactive maintenance and system management can also be simplified if you’re using an integration platform. When you’re correcting issues as they appear, their early detection is even more crucial. 

In theory, preventive and predictive maintenance are superior strategies. Some specialists advise on an ideal ratio for preventive to reactive maintenance of 80/20 or 6/1. In practice, however, this might often be nearly impossible to achieve. Is your company in a similar position? Many are. 

Moving towards a more balanced strategy is possible. It does take time, effort, and planning, though. 

Let us explain.

Shifting the balance: moving from reactive to preventive maintenance in IT

With a solid strategy and a scalable, easy-to-use software integration platform, you can start making the switch from reactive (corrective) to proactive maintenance. This helps you concentrate on prevention, and shift away from extinguishing fires and running after whatever the most urgent problem is. 

To avoid overwhelming your teams, start with your most critical assets, and then add more systems as you go. The whole process becomes easier if you break it down the process into 5 steps: 

1. Assess where you stand at the moment

Analyze your current approach, and use the data that you currently have at your disposal to track the biggest issues that drain the most resources. Determine the amount of reactive to preventive system management you’re currently doing, and check the state of your assets. 

2. Perform a criticality analysis of your systems

Determine which assets would incur the biggest losses in case they break down, as well as the ease of monitoring of each asset, and the speed at which you can deal with failure. Organize your equipment by its risk level, from highest to lowest risk, and go from there. 

3. Get different departments involved

In order to make meaningful changes, your whole organization needs to be involved in one way or another. Get people from different departments on board, and help them communicate the value of a successful preventive strategy. This guarantees the ownership of efforts, and helps you make sure that you’re not missing any critical elements. 

4. Match your assets and systems with the best approach that is currently available

Prioritize easy to achieve improvements at first, and move on from there. Getting good results early on will guarantee smooth implementation and wide acceptance. 

5. Analyze and finetune your strategy

The last step is, of course, making sure that the changes you’re implementing have a good return-on-investment (ROI). Analyze what’s working and what isn’t, and replicate or modify as needed. Your maintenance strategy needs to help you achieve your goals, not to overwhelm your employees with excessive maintenance work.