The method from Wednesday is simple enough that it should work every time. It does not, and the reason has nothing to do with the method.
The moment a tally sheet appears at an asset, the crew running that asset decides what it is. A measurement, or a performance review. That decision gets made in the first shift, mostly from tone and context rather than from anything anyone says, and it determines whether the next two weeks produce data worth having.
If they decide it is a review, the sheet will come back clean, cooperative, and useless. Nobody will lie. The small stops will simply not get recorded, because recording them looks like documenting your own shift’s problems, and no reasonable person volunteers for that.
Say the purpose out loud before the first shift
Not in an email. In person, to every shift, before the first entry.
The message is short:
We are pricing what this asset gives away so we can go get budget to fix it. Nobody is being timed. Nothing on this sheet goes into an appraisal. If the number comes out big, that helps us, because a big number is what gets the fix funded.
That last sentence does more work than the rest combined. It aligns the incentive. It tells the crew that thorough counting serves them, which happens to be true, because the funded outcome is fewer interruptions on their shift.
Then prove it
Stated intent buys you the first three days. What buys you the remaining eleven is acting on something the crew reported.
Within the first week, take one finding from the sheet and fix it visibly. It does not need to be the biggest one. A guard that has to be removed to clear a jam, a fitting that has been leaking for a year, a tool that lives two hundred feet from where it is used. Something small, something the operator raised, fixed fast, and acknowledged as having come from them.
One visible fix from operator reported data buys more accurate counting than any policy will. It converts the sheet from something being done to the crew into something being done with them, and the completeness of the data changes immediately.
The single conversation that ends it
Somewhere around day four, a manager who was not in the briefing will look at the sheet, see the number of entries, and ask why this line is stopping so many times.
That conversation, once, in earshot, ends honest counting permanently and it cannot be repaired. The crew will conclude they were right to be suspicious, and every subsequent measurement effort at that asset will inherit the damage.
So brief the managers, not just the crew. Everybody who might walk past that sheet needs to know what it is and what it is not. The count belongs to the asset, not to the shift.
Give the data back
At the end of the two weeks, show the crew the result. The ranked categories, the hours, and the dollar figure attached to the top one.
Most people who work on a constraint asset have never been shown what an hour of it is worth. Showing them changes how the asset gets run in ways no procedure achieves, and it costs you a fifteen minute conversation at shift handover.
It also means that when you come back in six months to count again, you will get a better sheet than you got the first time.
This week
Brief every shift. Brief the managers. Put the sheet out. Fix one thing they tell you about, fast and visibly.
Then next week we take the ranked profile and start pricing what it costs to get the hours back, where some of the actions you are expecting turn out to be the most expensive hours available.
