The Planner HQ Guide To: Managing The Work Order Lifecycle: 7 Steps to Bring Structure, Clarity, and Discipline to the Work Order Process

The Planner HQ Guide To: Managing The Work Order Lifecycle: 7 Steps to Bring Structure, Clarity, and Discipline to the Work Order Process

Bring structure, clarity, and discipline to your work order process. Every maintenance job starts with a work order. But too often, they’re vague, incomplete, or left to drift through the system. The result? Backlogs that don’t reflect reality, schedules that collapse mid-week, and technicians frustrated by missing details. This handbook shows you how to take control. The Planner HQ Guide To: Managing the Work Order Lifecycle gives maintenance planners, schedulers, and supervisors a clear framework for handling work orders from request to close-out. You’ll learn how to filter out low-quality requests, prepare jobs so they’re truly schedule-ready, link and group related tasks, and enforce the discipline of proper close-out. The result? A stronger schedule, smoother execution, and better data for future planning. Inside, you’ll discover how to: Capture and triage usable work requests that protect the integrity of your CMMS - Build readiness checks into your weekly rhythm to avoid mid-week failures - Link, group, and sequence jobs to optimise labour, downtime, and access windows - Strengthen close-out quality so your CMMS becomes a reliable source of truth - Collaborate with operations to build trust and reduce schedule conflicts This isn’t theory. It’s a practical, field-ready guide written for real planners working in real plants. Each chapter includes examples, visuals, and a Planner Exercise to help you apply the lessons to your own site. Who this book is for: Maintenance planners and schedulers who manage work orders daily - Maintenance supervisors balancing planning with leadership duties - Reliability or engineering coordinators working with CMMS data - Technicians stepping into hybrid planning roles - Operations managers who want to understand how maintenance work is controlled The Planner HQ Guide To: Managing the Work Order Lifecycle is part of the growing Planner HQ series of focused handbooks for modern maintenance planners. For a complete view of the planning role, see The Maintenance Planner’s Playbook . If you’re ready to move from firefighting to flow, this book will show you how.