Work Management
What is Work Management?
Work management is the process used to identify, plan, schedule and complete maintenance work on physical assets. It gives every maintenance job a consistent path from the moment a need is identified to the point the work is closed out and recorded.
Work management sits within the broader asset management framework, where it translates maintenance strategies and plans into executed work. The records it produces become the history used to evaluate whether those strategies are working as intended.
The Work Management Cycle
Most facilities follow a defined cycle that moves each job through the same stages:
- Identification: A need is raised as a notification or work request, either from a preventive maintenance plan or from a defect found in the field.
- Planning: A planner defines the scope of work, along with the labor and materials the job requires.
- Scheduling: Planned work is assigned a date and crew based on priority and resource availability.
- Execution: Technicians complete the work, following the job plan and any permits or isolations in place.
- Closeout: The work order is completed with details of what was found and done, including failure codes and actual hours.
Inside a Work Package
In work management, the work package is the main output of the planning stage. It gathers everything a technician needs to complete a job safely, and a complete package typically contains:
- A job plan with step-by-step tasks and estimated durations.
- A list of required materials and spare parts, reserved in advance.
- Relevant drawings and procedures linked to the equipment’s tag.
- Permit and isolation requirements for the work area.
The quality of these packages has a direct effect on how well the rest of the work management cycle performs. Incomplete packages disrupt the schedule, since technicians who arrive without the right part or drawing have to stop and wait.
Work Order Data
The closeout stage of work management turns each completed job into a record that adds to the maintenance history of an asset. When technicians record consistent failure codes and accurate descriptions, that history shows which assets fail most frequently and why. Reliability engineers use it to refine maintenance strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of the asset management plan, which in turn shapes the work identified in future cycles.
In practice, much of this information is captured as free text, which is difficult to analyze at scale. Structuring work order descriptions against standards such as ISO 14224 converts them into reliability data that supports predictive maintenance and analytics.