A Five-step Template to Get Your Next Maintenance Project Approved

Good ideas often die before they have a chance to succeed. That’s because where you see opportunity, others might only see risk.

This is especially true for maintenance, which is still viewed as a cost center at many organizations.

So, as a maintenance professional, how do you build a rock-solid case for your next big ask, whether it's more headcount, new technology, or something else? Read on to learn how to:

• Identify key stakeholders and align your project with their priorities
• Use data to win over naysayers
• Create a project plan that earns you trust

Download the maintenance leader’s pitch deck template and fill it out as you read

Who you’re pitching and what they care most

A winning pitch speaks to the pains and goals of decision-makers. Here’s how to tailor your pitch to each of them.

1. Leadership

Leadership, like directors, VPs, and executive leaders, care about:

• Growth and efficiency: They want to increase the value of the company and the impact of every dollar spent.
• Predictability and risk reduction: Senior leaders want the business to run with as much certainty and as little risk as possible.
• Data and insights: They’re always looking for information to help them spot opportunity, risk, and competitive advantages.
• Market positioning: Leaders are focused on how to become and stay the number-one company in their market.

2. Finance

The finance team often controls the budget, so they can be your biggest supporter or your biggest blocker. Their top priorities are:

• Cost efficiency: They want every dollar spent on labor, technology, resources, and assets to bring the biggest return.
• Cost certainty: They want to confidently forecast costs and ROI as far into the future as possible.
• Reporting: Finance always wants more insight to measure success and plan for the future.
• Scalability: They value projects that solve multiple problems for the business over a long period.
• Time to value: The quicker the ROI, the quicker the business can reinvest its money.

3. IT

If your ask involves new technology, the IT team can be a major ally when you involve them in the conversation early. The team’s main priorities are:

• Optimizing the tech stack: They want each part of the tech stack to provide as much value as possible with no redundancies.
• Tech implementation and management: IT wants to know how much of its time and resources are needed to set up and manage a solution.
• Scalability: They value any solution that can grow long-term with the company.
• Security and control: No solution is getting IT approval without being ultra-secure and controllable.

4. Maintenance and operations leaders

This group, including operations leaders and maintenance leaders at other facilities or in other regions, can be big champions for your idea. Their priorities are often similar to yours, including:

• Safety: Safety is the top priority for anyone with employees on the floor and will be a primary factory in any project you propose
• Core KPIs: They want to hit targets for metrics like downtime, preventive maintenance percentage, inventory costs, labor efficiency, and production capacity.
• Data and insights: One of their top goals is using data to improve their team’s work and show its value.
• Team performance and satisfaction: They want to get the most out of their people and budget while keeping morale high.
• Career development: They want to impress their managers to get a promotion, more trust, and a bigger budget.

5. Your team

If your team doesn’t buy in, others won’t either. You know them best, but here’s a quick guide to their top concerns:

• Getting home safe and on time: The job can be stressful enough without worrying about safety and longer hours.
• Doing their work without obstacles: Your team is good at what they do and want the chance to do it without unnecessary blockers.
• Job security: They want to know their job will always be there for them.
• Career development: This includes developing new skills, showcasing their value, and having their ideas heard.

Five Steps to Get Every Stakeholder to Approve your Maintenance Project

This five-step framework will help you find the right data to support your ask and structure it so every stakeholder gives the green light.

Step 1: Introduce the problem

Identifying the right problem can help position your project as a must-do. Here’s how to frame your problem to decision-makers:

• Describe the problem: Tell them why the status quo isn’t working.
• Show what the problem looks like: Give a tangible example of the problem.
• Explain the impact of the problem: Connect the consequences to their goals.
• Quantify the impact: This can include:
  
  • Cost: How much does it cost?
  • Time: How much time is being spent on this and where could it be spent instead?
  • Safety: Are you failing audits? Are near misses going up?
  • Employee retention: Is turnover increasing? Is employee satisfaction decreasing?
  • Quality: Is the product suffering?
  • The cost of doing nothing: What does the future look like without a solution?

‍How to present the problem to each stakeholder

1. Leadership: Use risk to frame the problem. What high-level priorities are at risk? What blindspots limit predictability? What is the cost of doing nothing?

2. Finance: Use waste to frame the problem. Where is the organization using money, labor, parts, assets, and tech inefficiently? What critical insights are missing? Where are the gaps in reporting?

3. IT: Use complexity to frame the problem. Where is there unnecessary complexity in the tech stack? How is this creating extra work and costs? Where do gaps in the tech stack increase security risks?

4. Peers: Point to what they’re missing when talking to their leaders and teams. Where are they missing targets? What data is missing? What would help them boost team efficiency?

5. Team: Focus on their daily frustrations. What slows them down or threatens their safety, job security, or ability to develop new skills?

Step 2: Present your solution

This frameworks will help you present your project as the best solution to the problem you outlined:

• Outline the solution: Tell them about the alternative to the status quo.
• Explain how it solves the problem: Give examples of how it permanently fixes the issue.
• Quantify the benefits: Use data to illustrate value, like:
  
  • Reduced costs (e.g. We’ll reduce contractor costs by $500k a year.)
  • Increased production (e.g. We’ll increase output by 12% in three months.)
  • Efficiency (e.g.. Labor efficiency will increase 38% across 10 facilities.)
  • Risk reduction (e.g. Emergency purchasing costs will decrease 46%.)
• Connect the solution to your project: Introduce your project as the best way to make this solution a reality

How to talk to each stakeholder about your solution

1. Leadership: Focus on how your solution reduces risk and maximizes impact. How will it boost revenue, cash flow, team efficiency, insights, and predictability?

2. Finance: Explain how your project reduces waste and increases stability. How will money, labor, assets, and tech be more efficient? How will inputs and outputs be more predictable?

3. IT: Use your solution to solve complexity. How does it support and streamline the current and future tech stack? How does it make it easier to maintain security and technology?

4. Peers: Describe how your idea helps them look good in front of their leaders and teams. How does it help them hit key KPIs, improve safety, and prove value?

5. Team: Frame your solution around removing roadblocks and frustrations. How will work be quicker and safer? How does it help them develop new skills?

Step 3: Build confidence in the project

Almost everyone has seen a project fail. You need to show that yours won’t. Here are a few ways to use data to ease concerns and increase confidence from decision-makers:   

• Show examples from other companies: Bonus points for a company in the same industry or a competitor. More bonus points for reaching out to people at those companies to get a first-hand account of the benefits and challenges.
• Look for proof of concept internally: If a similar project has worked, you have a blueprint for success, ready champions, and a case for scaling it. If it failed, you know the mistakes made and how to avoid them.
• Start small and build a business case: Test your idea without extra resources. You’ll be able to show value and identify risks and challenges early in the process.

How to talk to each stakeholder to create confidence in your solution

1. Leadership: Come with examples from their peers. Find success stories in the same industry, of a similar size, or with a similar problem. Compare that to the consequences for companies that didn’t solve the problem.

2. Finance: Come with a data-backed business plan. Speak about time to value and total cost of ownership using a progressive rollout that minimizes risk.

3. IT: Anticipate their requirements. Show how your solution overlaps with industry best practices, your company’s security guidelines, and the current tech stack.

4. Peers: Get buy-in from above and personalize the proof. This will assure them that they’ll get the support and resources needed to be successful. Present examples from the perspective of a similar role instead of at the business level. 

5. Team: Show them where they’ll have ownership. Include them in shaping the project and rollout so they know that growing pains and hard work will be recognized.

Step 4: Document and minimize risk

Pointing out what could go wrong with a project may seem counterintuitive, but it’s a chance to tell decision-makers how you’ll minimize risk. Here are three elements to building a risk mitigation plan:

• Identify potential risks: Find challenges that impacted past projects. Analyze your project to find where it can go wrong, including safety, adoption, costs, or delays.
• Lay out a plan to prevent risks: Tell decision-makers how you’ll prevent potential risks. For example, to prevent low adoption, you’ll recruit champions and schedule ongoing training.
• Explain how you’ll catch risks early: Set up early warning systems to fix problems before they get too big. For example, measure task completion rates to mitigate delays or do weekly data quality checks to catch discrepancies.

How to talk to each stakeholder about risks

1. Leadership: Use balance to reduce risk. How will you go fast without sacrificing quality or running up costs? How will you get alignment without being bogged down in approvals? How will you drive change without disrupting work?

2. Finance: Focus on money. What could push the project over budget, limit its ROI, or extend time to value? How are you tracking spending to minimize risk?

3. IT: Have a plan for vetting technology. List major risks for a tech solution and show how you’ll prevent them with a rigorous evaluation process that IT can help shape.

4. Peers: Use lessons from past successes and failures. How have they been burned before? What will be different this time? What projects worked and how will this be the same?

5. Team: Emphasize communication. Create processes to get the team’s feedback throughout the project. Include them in fixing any problems along the way.

Step 5: Outline your plan and what you need to make it work

A project plan outlines key tasks and milestones while setting expectations for progress, budget, and time to value. Use the list below to create your project plan, adjusting the level of detail for the audience. For example, senior leaders will want a high-level breakdown vs. maintenance managers:

• Timeline: How long will the project take to complete?
• Milestones: What are key points in the project and when will they be achieved?
• Tasks: What needs to be accomplished to reach each milestone?
• Roles: Who’ll be involved at each phase and what are their responsibilities?
• Resourcing: What resources are needed? This includes costs for labor, training, software, and opportunity costs, like extra downtime.
• KPIs: How is success defined and measured at each stage? Compare project costs to the cost of doing nothing and the projected benefit. Set benchmarks and use rolling averages to track progress.

How to talk to each stakeholder about your plan and resources

1. Leadership: Show quantifiable value at every stage. What ROI will the business see in one, six, 12, and 24 months? Don’t dive too deep in the first conversations, but have the details ready if asked.

2. Finance: Clearly communicate your costs, why they’re necessary, and how they translate into value. Tell them how you’ll work together to ensure the budget is used effectively.

3. IT: Show IT that you know the tech stack and want to collaborate with them to ensure their time is well-spent.

4. Peers: Give them a say in the plan. Give them time and permission to find gaps and make suggestions so they also feel a sense of ownership.

5. Team: Include your team in the planning process. Show how it will impact them and how you’re accounting for a change in their process, workload, and responsibilities.

Finalizing the perfect pitch

People don’t invest in projects. They invest in problems, solutions, and outcomes. Having a solid blueprint and quantifiable ROI will help you sell your vision to business leaders and improve your maintenance operations.

The key is preparation. Anticipate tough questions. Tie everything to business goals. Show progress in phases. When you frame your project as a smart, low-risk investment, you’re not just asking for approval, you’re making it hard to say no.