Mr. Joel Levitt, author of Managing Maintenance Shutdowns and Outages is the President of Springfield Resources, a maintenance management training and consultation firm. He has over 30 years of maintenance experience, is the author of several books in the field and frequently speaks at maintenance and engineering conferences.

Mr. Levitt was kind enough to contact us upon the publication of his book, Managing Maintenance Shutdowns and Outages. He forwarded a copy for our review and we found the material to be mostly aligned with the material that we have published for free in our Turnaround Project Planning Primer and our Turnaround Project Management Primer

The book is well organized, well written and easy to read. We believe that Managing Maintenance Shutdowns and Outages does a great job of covering all the bases and providing a road map for preparing and executing a turnaround. We are recommending this book for all professionals in the field.

Our only caveat is that the book promotes resource leveling as a viable method of managing resources for turnarounds. We believe that a different approach is required if the schedule is to maintain any usefulness for driving the execution in a turnaround. We have detailed our reasons in our Resource Leveling vs. Critical Mass white paper. We have forwarded our comments on this issue to Mr. Levitt and hope to see the issue addressed in more depth should there be another edition to the book in the future.