How to Turn a Maintenance Backlog Into a Staffing Plan

Doc Palmer, author of McGraw-Hill's Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook and managing partner of Richard Palmer and Associates, describes how plants tend to size a maintenance crew. When two of ten electricians leave, the reasoning goes, "Let's see if we can get by with eight." When things start breaking, it turns into "Let's hire a few more electricians," he says in a January 2024 column for Plant Services.

Neither decision starts from the hours of work waiting in the queue.

A maintenance backlog can be turned into a headcount you can defend in a budget meeting. The count has to be cleaned first, and the productive day has to be measured honestly before anyone divides hours by people.

Convert the backlog into crew-weeks before you count people

Owe Forsberg, vice president of IDCON, defines the unit with plain arithmetic. Ten technicians at 40 hours a week is 400 hours, and 400 hours is one crew-week. Divide backlog hours by that figure and you know how many weeks of work are sitting in the queue. For the process industry, best practice is "a backlog of 4-6 crew weeks in total for weekly and daily work," Forsberg says, and pharma and food plants may target about two to four.

SMRP's Best Practice Metric 5.4.9 narrows the idea to work that can actually start. Ready Backlog is ready-to-schedule backlog divided by available craft capacity, stated in weeks on a 40-hour workweek, according to the 2014 SMRP metrics workbook. Jeff Shiver, founder and managing principal of People and Processes, Inc., gives targets for both. "Target two to four crew weeks of ready-to-schedule (RTS) backlog and four to six weeks of total backlog," Shiver says in a November 2024 Plant Services column.

Both numbers matter to a staffing decision. Eight crew-weeks of total backlog with one week ready is a planning problem, and new hires would mostly stand around waiting for work packages.

Forsberg adds two rules. Shutdown backlog is calculated separately from weekly and daily work. And more craftspeople get hired only after "a long-term trend of backlog increase over at least 6 months." Until then, his options are moving people between areas, working overtime or bringing in contractors.

NYCHA's backlog shows why the count needs cleaning

New York City's public housing authority shows how far a work-order count can drift from the work. In October 2013 NYCHA announced it had cut open orders from a peak of about 423,000 to roughly 175,500, after adding 565 employees, 389 of them new maintenance and skilled trade workers. Clearing the backlog did not mean zero open orders. NYCHA expected about 90,000 to be open at any given time once the effort ended, the number it would have if routine requests took an average of 7 days and more complex ones an average of 15.

Less than two years later the New York City Comptroller's audit found that NYCHA's reported figure of approximately 84,500 open orders, as of July 31, 2014, understated the real total by more than 50,000 (nearly 31,000 inspection orders, close to 17,000 preventive maintenance orders and around 3,400 violation orders). Since February 2013, NYCHA had been closing non-emergency orders when the resident was not home for a single repair attempt. That policy shrank the backlog on paper "without fixing a single problem," the Comptroller's office says.

Which orders may close, and which order types get counted, decide the number. Before converting anything into people, strip out duplicates and finished work that was never closed, and put the preventive and inspection orders back in.

Only work a crew can start belongs in the headcount

A job with no parts, no drawings or no outage window produces zero crew hours next week, no matter how urgent it is. A 2017 UW-Madison master's thesis by Godwin Offiah surveyed 182 electrical field personnel, about nine in ten of them working, general or non-working foremen. Twenty-seven percent had been held up by missing materials, and 40% did not have enough space to do their work. The response rate was 6.07%, so read it as a field sample.

Tom Walker of Lakeview Enterprise Associates wrote on Reliabilityweb about a shutdown where the owner's contract coordinator sent job packages to the contractor's head office. Nobody forwarded them. The foreman "showed up on the job empty handed with no idea of the work he was supposed to do," Walker wrote.

OSHA's communication and coordination guidance asks host employers to share hazard information "before on-site work starts and, as needed, if conditions change," and to coordinate work planning and scheduling with contractors and staffing agencies. The same page asks hosts and staffing agencies to handle unexpected staffing needs by making sure enough trained and equipped workers are available or that there is adequate lead time to train them. For temporary workers, OSHA's page describes shared responsibilities. The agency and the host "must work together," and in OSHA's example the agency might provide general safety training while the host provides training specific to its own equipment and hazards.

An electrician gives you about six productive hours a day

Stan Shook, Electrical Contractor's estimating columnist from 2005 to 2012, gives the simple crew formula in a May 2008 column as total man-hours divided by work days divided by 8 hours a day. His example of 4,000 hours over 120 working days comes to 4.17 electricians. He corrects it a paragraph later. "You'll be lucky to get six fully productive labor hours per day, per electrician," Shook says. At six hours the same job needs 5.5 electricians. "Might as well make it six."

Palmer's number is lower. Typical company workforces show 35% wrench time, he says in a January 2022 Plant Services column, which works out to about 3½ hours of actively moving a job ahead in a 10-hour shift. He does not trust the metric much ("Wrench time can be a terrible measure!"), and the 35% already gives credit to anyone at the job site, the confined space guard included.

Planner estimates are rough, too. In a 2019 column, Palmer puts the error on individual jobs at "perhaps as much as plus or minus 100%," so a job planned for five hours might take one or two hours, or eight or nine. The errors tend to cancel. A week of 400 estimated hours for a crew of 10 might come in no more than 15% off the total, he says. Staff to the crew-week total.

Palmer's larger claim is about scheduling. "Proper scheduling, supported by planned labor estimates, gives a pop of nearly 50% in work order completion," he says in the 2024 column, enough to take a shop from 1,000 closed orders a month to 1,500 with the same people.

Overtime beats overmanning on electrical crews

When ready work really does exceed the crew, the choice is how to add hours. An ELECTRI International study by Awad Hanna of UW-Madison, built on electrical projects executed from 2004 to 2008, concluded that an electrical crew on overtime is still more efficient than overmanning. Contractors surveyed rated a second shift 6.145 out of 10 as an alternative to extended overtime. Overmanning scored 2.305. The report's explanation is that with extra labor on site, "maintaining adequate access to tools, materials, and space is much more difficult."

Overtime still costs something. In the same study a Midwest electrical contractor on a casino parking structure used sporadic overtime from week 43 to week 64. Hours averaged 51.65 a week over that stretch, and the model put the efficiency loss at 26.5%, or 11,571.49 labor hours out of 43,666. Our overtime versus flex crew post runs that tradeoff in more detail.

Outage work gets its own staffing plan

Energy Northwest hired 2,000 additional skilled workers for the spring 2025 refueling outage at Columbia Generating Station near Richland, Wash., on top of about 1,000 permanent workers, with more than 10,000 tasks scheduled over a planned 56 days, Annette Cary reported. The major project that spring was replacing the adjustable speed drive, which controls the pumps that move water through the reactor. RV parks and short-term rentals around the Tri-Cities were booked up well ahead of vacation season. In 2023 the utility hired 1,200 for an outage planned at 35 days that stretched to 44.

At Grand Gulf Nuclear Station in Port Gibson, Miss., the 25th refueling outage began Feb. 14, 2026, with more than 700 full-time employees and more than 1,300 contract workers. Major projects "are planned years in advance, with all the work reviewed and approved long before the outage begins," Entergy says. "These outages provide an economic boost for local businesses and temporary housing providers," says Brad Kapellas, Grand Gulf site vice president. That is Forsberg's separate shutdown backlog at full size, and the post-outage handoff covers what happens once the contract crews leave.

NFPA 70B adds electrical hours to the queue

NFPA 70B used to be a recommended practice. The 2023 edition, the first as a standard, was issued by the NFPA Standards Council on Dec. 27, 2022, and became effective Jan. 16, 2023, according to Corey Hannahs, NFPA senior electrical content specialist. NFPA lists 2026 as the current edition.

M.E. Valdes of ABB and Karl Cunningham of ES Squared walk through the 2023 text in an IEEE Electrical Safety Workshop paper. Section 15.3.5, Electrical Testing, lists 14 tests for low-voltage circuit breakers, including infrared thermography, contact resistance on each pole and an inverse time trip test at 300% of rated continuous current, with separate columns for molded-case breakers up to 250A frame and above it. Facilities that tried to follow the older 2019 recommended practice usually struggled for lack of management support, lack of qualified people or trouble scheduling shutdowns, they say. Taken together with the required intervals, the low-voltage breaker list "has been overwhelming to most facilities," they write.

Qualified electricians are hard to find. In the AGC and NCCER 2026 Workforce Survey of 1,830 respondents, 81% of firms with electrician openings reported difficulty filling them, and 20% use craft staffing firms. "The need for people to work on new data centers is keeping labor conditions tight even as demand for many other types of projects remains relatively soft," says Ken Simonson, AGC's chief economist. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 821,000 electrician jobs in 2025 and projects about 72,700 openings a year through 2035.

Mindy Bates, human resources director at Ace Electric in Valdosta, Ga., spoke on an AGC webinar in September, Construction Dive's Sebastian Obando reported. "You cannot hire your way out of this situation," Bates says. "We got to grow it from within as well." Ace Electric runs data center work with both local and traveling teams, and turnover is highest on the traveling teams, she says. "We do have to turn down work," Bates says. "We don't want to overcommit ourselves."

Sources

1. Why proactive work dies in the backlog and how to fix it, Doc Palmer, Plant Services, Jan. 9, 2024.
2. How to Calculate the Backlog and Manage Your Resources, Owe Forsberg, IDCON, Dec. 29, 2020 (updated Feb. 25, 2025).
3. SMRP Metrics Workshop Workbook, SMRP Best Practices Committee, hosted by PEMAC, 2014.
4. Overcoming common maintenance obstacles through better planning and scheduling, Jeff Shiver, Plant Services, Nov. 11, 2024.
5. NYCHA Eliminates Almost a Quarter of a Million Repair Work Orders from Its Backlog, New York City Housing Authority, Oct. 1, 2013.
6. Comptroller Stringer Audit Reveals Tens of Thousands of Backlogged Repairs at NYCHA, Office of the New York City Comptroller, July 13, 2015.
7. Qualitative Analysis of Lost Labor Productivity in Electrical Construction from the Perspective of Field Personnel, Godwin Ashley Dilibe Offiah, M.S. thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Fall 2017.
8. Shutdowns and Turnarounds from the Contractor's Perspective, Tom Walker, Reliabilityweb, July 20, 2010.
9. Communication and Coordination for Host Employers, Contractors, and Staffing Agencies, OSHA, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
10. Protecting Temporary Workers, OSHA, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
11. Calculating Manpower, Stan Shook, Electrical Contractor, May 15, 2008.
12. Why wrench time can be a terrible metric, Doc Palmer, Plant Services, Jan. 5, 2022.
13. Understanding the math of maintenance planning and scheduling, Doc Palmer, Plant Services, March 4, 2019.
14. Impact of Overtime on Electrical Labor Productivity: A Measured Mile Approach, Awad S. Hanna, ELECTRI International, 2011.
15. Why 2,000 workers were just hired at NW's only nuclear power reactor, Annette Cary, McClatchy (Bellingham Herald) via Yahoo News, April 13, 2025.
16. Grand Gulf begins scheduled refueling outage, Entergy, Feb. 16, 2026.
17. Safely Maintain Electrical Equipment According to NFPA 70B, Corey Hannahs, NFPA, June 20, 2025.
18. NFPA 70B Standard Development, NFPA, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
19. The New NFPA 70B-2023 Standard for Electrical Maintenance (ESW2023-18), M.E. Valdes and Karl Cunningham, IEEE Electrical Safety Workshop, 2023.
20. 2026 Workforce Survey Analysis, AGC and NCCER, Sept. 3, 2026.
21. Construction Workforce Shortages Remain Acute Despite 'Soft' Market Conditions As Data Centers Strain Labor Supply, Survey Finds, AGC, Sept. 3, 2026.
22. Electricians, Occupational Outlook Handbook, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, accessed Sept. 29, 2026.
23. Labor squeeze prompts revised construction workforce strategies, Sebastian Obando, Construction Dive, Sept. 14, 2026.

Featured image: U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Walla Walla District (public domain).