The hidden cost of delayed reliability projects
By Rachel Scott and Jarrod Chesher
Reliability work is all about enhancing asset performance, minimising downtime, and maintaining smooth operations. Nevertheless, despite the intentions, often reliability engineering projects lag behind schedule. The real issue? It’s usually not the technical task itself—it’s the people required to deliver it.
Across industries, organisations deal with talent gaps in asset management, unclear scopes, stretched maintenance teams, and hiring processes that move far too slowly for fast-paced operational needs. The result is the cost of project delays—and those delays ripple across your production, budgets, morale, and long-term asset confidence.
Why reliability projects often fall behind
You’ve probably seen this scenario: a reliability review, Root Cause Analysis, or FMEA gets planned months in advance. Everyone agrees it’s critical. Then it gets delayed. And delayed again. Before you know it, breakdowns continue and maintenance teams are still reacting instead of preventing.
There are a few recurring reasons reliability projects struggle to stay on track:
1. Understaffed teams
Most organisations still rely heavily on maintenance teams who are already stretched thin. These teams spend most of their day dealing with urgent breakdowns, inspections, and work orders. Strategic reliability work, of course, gets put on the backburner when you're too busy fighting fires. Activities such as Root Cause Analysis, condition monitoring reviews, and long-term improvement planning need specialized time and space - which the maintenance crews hardly possess. The result? Reliability improvement activities are perceived as important, but not urgent, and are repeatedly postponed.
2. Unclear scope or expectations
At the very start of a reliability improvement project, it must have an articulate brief, what do we want to accomplish, who is doing it, what do we need to know, what will success mean, and when? In the absence of these elements being defined early, misunderstandings creep in. Teams may end up repeating decisions or reworking documents or waiting to get clarifications. This leads to scope creep, unnecessary friction, and schedules that silently slip without anyone officially recognising it.
3. Poor handover between design, operations and maintenance
The new assets usually come with documentation loopholes. Installation is often handled by commissioning teams who move on quickly, leaving operational teams to figure out reliability strategies from scratch. Maintenance crews are assigned equipment that lacks a comprehensive history of failures or a specific maintenance schedule. This dynamic setting drives teams into break-fix rather than proactive reliability.
4. Mismatched expertise
Reliability engineering is not a universally applicable skill set. The person in charge needs specific competencies for tasks like vibration analysis, lifecycle costing, or FMEA. A general engineer without that background might do their best, but it often leads to rework, inconsistencies, or an incomplete analysis.
5. Traditional hiring is too slow
Engineering recruitment is not very fast, and the cycle consists of interviews and approvals, and onboarding, and it is possible to say that it may take months. Reliability needs, however, usually come in when there are performance problems. By the time a new hire starts, the window to prevent a breakdown may have closed, making on-demand support a more viable solution.
In case you want to refresh up on what reliability work entails, there is this useful outline:
What is reliability engineering?
The financial and operational impact of project delays
It's easy to think delaying a reliability project by a month is acceptable. Late is a fault that has its price and is usually concealed until the time it is too late to maintain some cost.
Let’s break those down:
1. Extended downtime
Equipment continues to fail, when we postpone the reliability improvements. Every minute of downtime has a compounding cost—not just in lost output, but in wasted labour, resources, and emergency measures.
2. Higher maintenance spend
Planned work is always cheaper than unplanned repairs. A simple, proactive bearing replacement can prevent a disastrous failure that requires a complete rebuild—a risk that increases when reliability work is delayed.
3. Missed production targets
Production teams are dependent on availability of assets. If reliability work is delayed, capacity drops, and targets are missed. This impacts on revenue, reputation and customer commitments.
4. Increased operational risk
Equipment failures can jeopardise health, safety, and environmental standards. When the reliability tasks are lagged, the risk control measures are lagged.
5. Loss of asset confidence
Once teams lose faith in an asset, their behaviour changes. They might underutilise it or avoid using it altogether. That's value left on the table.
A delayed FMEA is a common thing to take. In its absence, there is no understanding of the failure modes. Maintenance strategies remain reactive. And every failure triggers an expensive chain reaction. To have an effective walkthrough of how to construct FMEAs within the Australian environment, refer to:
A Guide to Using FMEA in Australian Asset Management
Reliability engineering is not new. It is long-established in the aerospace, defence, manufacturing and engineering innovation. In case you want to know how we got here, you might consider the following:
The Fascinating History of Reliability Engineering
Reliability Engineering & Oppenheimer: A Historic Connection
Bridging the talent gap to avoid costly delays
The solution isn't complex—but it does require you to be proactive, not reactive.
Here’s how we close the gap:
1. Align skills to the project early
The first step is to determine what expertise you need. Reliability engineering is wide-ranged - RCM facilitators, lubrication specialists, root cause analysts, CBM technicians, and reliability strategists can bring their respective strengths. Choosing the right person from the start prevents rework and keeps timelines on track.
2. On-demand access to qualified reliability engineers
Instead of taking months before a permanent recruit is secured to fill a vacancy, there are specialised networks of reliability support to tap into. With pre-vetted, industry-experienced reliability engineers on demand, you gain the flexibility to maintain momentum.
This is especially useful for:
- Shutdown planning
- New asset commissioning
- Lifecycle cost modelling
- RCA backlogs
- FMEA, RCM and risk workshop facilitation
3. Upskill existing teams through targeted training
Your existing people may possess the familiarity of the site content, relationships and the equipment familiarity required to succeed. They can simply be unstructured of reliability methodology. This capability can be developed efficiently with the help of targeted training or mentoring.
4. Use transparent selection and performance tracking
Pre-specify success metrics, deliverables, timelines, handovers, and accountability. The implementation of the project is expedited and the communication is easy with the clear view of the progress made by all.
5. Embed reliability work into routine planning
Reliability is not to be viewed as a special project. It should be included in maintenance planning, asset strategy, capital projects and operator care programs. The more you think about reliability in the beginning, the less you are going to be surprised later.
Delayed reliability work costs far more than time. It affects asset performance, operational stability, budgets, and team confidence. It's not always a technical problem. Often, the real issue is lacking the appropriate expertise at the right moment, with clear expectations and effective implementation.
You can reduce project delays and achieve better predictable and efficient performance by addressing the gaps in talent and asset management early. This means identifying skill requirements upfront and ensuring you have access to flexibility in your capability and reliability resources.
When early reliability work is done well, the rest of the downstream work becomes much easier.
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