"Free Dave" Day 5: Dave Saves the Outage

⏰ Now we’re going to #freedave from outage-prep stress.

T-14 on the outage. The final vendor manual for the new digital turbine control just arrived — two weeks late and different from the pre-release spec the team has been using to write the startup test procedure.

𝐃𝐚𝐯𝐞'𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝 𝐰𝐚𝐲: Four engineers crash to get the procedure done, two working from the pre-release spec and two from the final manual without realizing it. Acceptance criteria get written inconsistently. The vendor gets called twice to clarify discrepancies. Review comments go back and forth. The outage might already be off schedule.

𝐖𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐆𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐢𝐚𝐧: Ingests both manuals side by side, catches 14 deltas between them before a single procedure step gets written. Six affect acceptance criteria. Drafts the full procedure from the correct source. But it flags the overspeed protection criterion — different between manuals — for Dave.

Dave has watched this turbine for 22 years. He knows it tripped at 108% during a load rejection in 2011 and again in 2018. He tightens the criterion to 107% and writes the basis. He signs the procedure. Ready-to-enter happens on schedule.

513 𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬 𝐟𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐝 by now. That's 64 working days. Dave just bought the company nearly 1% of his career back in two weeks. 𝐇𝐞’𝐬 𝐭𝐚𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐚𝐲 𝐨𝐟𝐟 𝐣𝐮𝐬𝐭 𝐭𝐨 𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐲𝐚𝐫𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐲.