Last March, a junior technician at the Beckton treatment plant spent forty minutes tracing a valve that was not on any diagram. Someone had drywalled over the access hatch during a 2017 retrofit and forgotten to note it. The valve existed. Its location did not.
What Maintenance Culture Teaches Us About Software
Every industrial site has a logbook — physical, grease-stained, filled in by hand at shift change. Entries are blunt: Pump 4 vibrating, flagged. The logbook survives power outages and vendor bankruptcies. It outlasts the SCADA system it documents.
A system that cannot be understood by the person standing in front of it at 3 AM is not a system — it is a liability.
We ship dashboards with real-time metrics but bury architecture decisions in wikis nobody updates. The engineer who inherits this at 3 AM during an incident will not thank us for the animation polish. They will thank us for leaving a trail.