This book's purpose is to discover and review the many relationships that maintenance will need to foster daily if it is to become best in class. Success in any walk of life is dependent on partner relationships. A successful marriage is based on a relationship in which both partners collectively embrace their similarities, whilst they collaborate to use each other's strengths to overcome weaknesses and bridge their differences. Where teams are concerned, there will be many partner relationships that will need to be navigated and managed separately to achieve a defined and unified level of success.

On any single day, a maintainer must interact multiple times with internal and external resource partners to perform their job. To function professionally a maintenance department must set up and manage multiple partnerships on a continual basis. Partnerships are relationships that live or die based on an understanding of the input and output communications and tangible deliverables required from both sides to make quality management decisions and enable each partner to consistently deliver on their performance mandate at minimum cost.

Building healthy business partner relationships allows both partners to state their respective points of view—and teaches us not to make assumptions on each other’s behalf. Understanding, measuring and tracking what we control lets us objectively define how and where the partnership must work together to better manage and resolve issues that are out of our control, or those we must simply manage.