Why the best work often goes unnoticed

By Stuart Spiers | 28-1-26

Everyone likes to say they’re proactive. It sounds reassuring. It suggests control, foresight, and good management.

But in solar O&M, you can usually tell how proactive a team really is by one simple thing. Timing.

True proactivity rarely announces itself. It doesn’t come with incident reports or dramatic fixes. In fact, the best proactive work is invisible, because it prevents issues that never become issues in the first place.

A strong O&M team isn’t defined by how quickly they react to faults. It’s defined by how often faults never happen at all.

That kind of prevention shows up quietly. It’s an engineer noticing a pattern that doesn’t quite sit right and taking a closer look. It’s tightening something that hasn’t failed yet, but might if left another season. It’s logging something small because experience says it probably won’t stay small for long.

None of that makes headlines. Most of it never makes a report. But over time, it shapes performance in a very real way.

The challenge is that reactive work is easy to measure. A fault happens, it gets fixed, the system is back online. Prevention is harder to see. You’re measuring something that didn’t occur. But anyone who has managed solar assets for long enough knows the difference it makes.

As portfolios mature, this becomes even more important. Systems age. Components behave less predictably. Small inefficiencies can compound quietly. In that environment, waiting for alarms or failures is expensive. Prevention is not just good practice, it’s a performance strategy.

Proactive teams tend to share a few things in common. They escalate early without fear of being told something is too minor. They spend time understanding how assets normally behave, so deviations stand out quickly. They take pride in leaving sites better than they found them, even when no one is checking.

This approach doesn’t remove every problem. Solar will always have variables outside anyone’s control. But it does change the odds. It reduces surprises. It keeps issues smaller. It protects performance over the long term.

In operations and maintenance, prevention is often the highest form of performance. Not because it looks impressive, but because it works.

Because we care.

---