Six questions to find out whether your PM compliance number reflects work that actually happened.
PM Compliance is one of the most reported metrics in maintenance and one of the least trustworthy, because most organizations measure whether a work order was closed, not whether the work was done. Those are not the same thing.
This self-assessment walks you through six diagnostic questions that target the most common sources of inflated compliance: undefined compliance windows, PMs auto-completing without verification, completions with zero labor hours, serial deferrals that never count as misses, PdM work lumped in with calendar PMs, and the gap between compliance and reactive work trends. Each question includes the Maximo context: which fields to check, what the data pattern looks like, and what it means for your number.
Answer yes to 0 to 1 questions and your number is largely trustworthy. Two to three yes answers means your number overstates real compliance, which is common and fixable with a focused audit. Four or more means your dashboard is measuring closure, not work, and the definition and verification process need rebuilding before you can trend the number.
PM Compliance and Reactive Work Percentage move together when a program is real. If compliance climbs and reactive work falls, the program is working. If compliance is high and reactive work stays high, either the compliance number is hollow or the PMs are the wrong PMs on the wrong assets at the wrong frequency. That is why the first thing to check when good compliance is not reducing breakdowns is whether the compliance number is real.
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This assessment tells you whether to trust your number. The full Maximo KPI Guide: PM Compliance covers the on-time definition choices, KPI Manager SQL for compliance percentage and overdue counts, the segmentation methodology, the drilldown from aggregate to root cause, and the business case to justify a compliance program.