Is There a Process for Reviewing and Learning from Each Maintenance Activity to Improve Future Practices?

In the fast-paced world of scaling startups and SMEs, where technology and business are intrinsically linked, it's easy for maintenance activities to be viewed as routine—necessary but not always transformative. However, I’ve found that within every maintenance activity lies an opportunity for improvement and growth. Reviewing and learning from these activities should be part of any organisation's DNA, particularly in tech-driven environments where incremental improvements can yield significant results.

This article explores the importance of establishing a process for reviewing and learning from maintenance activities, offering a framework to help startups and SMEs continuously improve their practices. By integrating a learning loop into maintenance processes, companies can boost operational efficiency, mitigate risks, and ensure their technology supports long-term business goals.

The Importance of Continuous Learning in Maintenance

One of the key differentiators between companies that merely maintain and those that excel is their approach to learning from every interaction with their technology. Maintenance activities—be it server upkeep, software patches, or infrastructure repairs—are often viewed as reactive measures, designed to fix what is broken or prevent downtime. However, there is significant value in transforming these reactive tasks into proactive learning opportunities. Each instance provides insights into system performance, operational resilience, and team capabilities.

For growing companies, particularly those in technology-centric industries like fintech, SaaS, and healthtech, there’s a tangible need for a framework that allows them to not only execute maintenance efficiently but also learn from each action. By embedding a learning process into these activities, teams can identify recurring issues, uncover root causes, and adjust their practices to prevent future problems, fostering continuous improvement.

Establishing a Review and Learning Process

Creating a structured review process following each maintenance activity ensures that valuable insights are captured, analysed, and acted upon. This can be broken down into the following steps:

Documentation

The first step is proper documentation of the maintenance activity itself. This includes the specifics of what was done, why it was done, and the outcome. Clear documentation creates a record that can be referred back to, ensuring that the context is not lost as time passes. It's important to note that this isn’t just about listing technical details; it also involves noting any issues encountered, decision-making processes, and communication breakdowns that may have occurred.

Post-Maintenance Review

Once the maintenance activity is complete, a post-maintenance review should take place. This involves gathering the team responsible for the activity and discussing what went well, what could have been improved, and any unexpected challenges. This review is crucial for identifying process inefficiencies or gaps in knowledge. The discussion should be open and honest, encouraging team members to share their experiences without fear of blame.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

If the maintenance activity was in response to an issue or failure, a root cause analysis is essential. RCA is a structured method used to identify the underlying causes of faults or problems. It digs deeper than surface-level symptoms, aiming to uncover the reasons why something happened, rather than just treating the immediate issue. For instance, rather than simply fixing a recurring server outage, RCA might reveal that the root cause is a configuration issue, which once corrected, could prevent future outages.

Learning and Action Plan

After conducting a review and identifying the root cause, the next step is to develop a learning and action plan. This involves outlining specific steps to prevent the issue from occurring again and identifying any additional training or resources the team might need. It's essential that these learnings are incorporated into the team's daily practices, and not simply filed away. For example, if the review uncovered a skill gap in cloud infrastructure management, the action plan might include upskilling or hiring a specialist.

Knowledge Sharing

Learning from maintenance activities should not be siloed within one team or department. By creating a culture of knowledge sharing, startups and SMEs can ensure that insights from one team’s maintenance activities are shared across the entire organisation. This can be achieved through regular cross-team meetings, internal documentation systems, or even informal knowledge-sharing sessions. The goal is to ensure that all parts of the organisation benefit from the lessons learned in maintenance, helping to prevent similar issues elsewhere.

Continuous Monitoring and Feedback

Finally, continuous monitoring and feedback loops ensure that the changes implemented as a result of the learning process are having the desired effect. Regular check-ins and automated monitoring systems can help track the performance of changes and identify any new issues early. This feedback should be looped back into the review process, ensuring that it remains a living, evolving practice within the organisation.

Case Study: Learning from Maintenance to Drive Innovation

To put this process into context, consider a scenario I encountered while working with a scaling fintech startup. They had experienced several outages due to a database failure during periods of high traffic, severely impacting their user experience. After patching the problem multiple times, they finally decided to implement a post-maintenance review process.

The first step was documentation. The team documented every instance of the outage, noting not only the technical fixes applied but also the time taken, the communications flow, and the business impact.

Next, they conducted a post-maintenance review. Through candid discussions, they realised that while the patches were fixing the immediate problems, they weren’t addressing the root cause—an overloaded database architecture that couldn’t scale with their rapid user growth.

With a structured root cause analysis, they discovered that their existing database setup was not optimised for horizontal scaling. Armed with this insight, they developed a learning and action plan, which included migrating to a more scalable database solution, conducting training on the new infrastructure, and creating automated alerts for traffic spikes.

The learnings from this activity were shared across the entire tech team and even with some business stakeholders. They implemented changes not just to the database, but also to how they planned for infrastructure growth, ensuring scalability was built into all future product developments.

Through continuous monitoring, the company found that their changes significantly reduced downtime and improved performance during peak usage periods. This iterative learning process didn’t just resolve the original issue—it also sparked innovation, as the team began applying similar principles of scalability and proactive planning to other parts of their system architecture.

Overcoming the Challenges of Establishing a Learning Process

Of course, implementing a process for reviewing and learning from maintenance activities comes with its challenges. The most common hurdle I’ve seen in scaling startups and SMEs is the temptation to skip the learning phase due to time pressures. When deadlines are tight and resources are stretched, it can seem easier to apply a quick fix and move on.

However, neglecting the learning process only leads to recurring problems down the line. To overcome this, it’s essential for leadership to foster a culture where learning is prioritised. This doesn’t mean slowing down progress—in fact, the insights gained from these reviews often lead to more efficient processes and fewer disruptions, which ultimately saves time and resources.

Another challenge is ensuring that reviews are conducted consistently and not just when something goes wrong. Even successful maintenance activities can offer valuable lessons, whether it's streamlining a process or identifying a new best practice. Building this discipline into your organisation's processes requires commitment from both leadership and the team, but the rewards are well worth the effort.

Conclusion: Turning Maintenance into a Competitive Advantage

In the high-growth world of scaling startups and SMEs, maintenance activities shouldn’t be viewed as a mundane or purely reactive task. By establishing a structured process for reviewing and learning from each maintenance activity, businesses can transform these routine tasks into opportunities for improvement, innovation, and growth.

This approach does more than just prevent problems—it aligns with broader business goals, enhances operational resilience, and encourages a culture of continuous learning. In an era where technology is often the key differentiator, those who leverage maintenance as a tool for ongoing learning and adaptation will be better positioned to scale successfully and sustainably.

Leadership, therefore, should champion this process, embedding it into the company’s culture and ensuring that every maintenance activity contributes not just to the upkeep of their systems but to the future strength and scalability of their business.