The Cost of Maintenance
Always be maintaining
This past Saturday, the train that I like to take was “motorized” (that is, replaced by buses) in order to trim some trees near the overhead wires.
Thankfully, the buses were pretty similar in schedule and route, and so the landscaping project was not terribly upsetting to regular expectations of transportation. I think, however, this is an exception— I’d been noticing lately how things need to get shut down in order to be maintained.
For instance, the DMV login portal was down the day I had wanted to renew my driver’s license— this was a planned outage, according to the site banner. Or in a previous week, a lane on the freeway was closed in order to repair a pothole, which lengthened my commute by 20 minutes.
The act of maintenance is a nuisance. In addition to the actual work being menial and tedious, having to divert standard business-as-usual procedures is another undertaking in itself. This is why maintenance can be considered quite expensive. As a result, I find that people who are in a rush or who are not very invested will forgo it altogether. This is a very myopic way of thinking.
One other argument for skipping maintenance that I have heard is that the service is so necessary (literally everything depends on it!) that it cannot go offline, not even for a second. To me, this is a sign that the system is engineered very badly (which is a different topic).
So then, how can we decrease the cost of maintenance, such that it is cheaper and easier to do? I find that the value of maintenance is not very quantifiable, so convincing someone to halt, say, a week’s worth of normal activity in order to perform maintenance is very difficult.
My answer is very obvious— which is to simply do it more often. Maybe make it a habit, or plan it out in small incremental chunks that avoid or minimize disrupting the regular flow of work.
What we need to avoid is putting off maintenance for so long that you have no choice but to do it— business as usual cannot proceed unless it is done. In this case, the task probably no longer qualifies as simply an act of “maintenance”, and business as usual was, in fact, probably not normal and very much struggling. As they say, if you don't schedule maintenance for your car, it will schedule it for you.
And so the conclusion here is: Always be maintaining.