Our mission at Talking Infrastructure is to promote the good practices of Asset Management Wave 2 and develop thinking on Waves 3 and 4.
It’s an evolutionary model: you need the solid processes of whole life costing, sophisticated risk thinking, and longer-term asset planning both for the sake of your own organisation’s ability to deliver and to underpin (to ground) decisions on new infrastructure and new types of assets.
So we plan to:
- Continue to promote better strategic Asset Management, Wave 2, through re-emphasising the core AM tool of longer-term asset planning as well as development of more sophisticated asset risk and decision-making concepts
- Develop a guidebook to the AMP, to restate and update Penny’s original vision for the changing contexts of the 2020s, with case studies such as Grant County PUD
- We would also like to see campaigning for infrastructure regulators to have more teeth through AMP requirements and audits to encourage agencies to plan ahead
Plan for work on Wave 3, infrastructure decision making especially on new and renewed assets includes:
- Promote work already done, such as the UK Projects and Infrastructure Project Routemap module on Asset Management, https://projectdelivery.gov.uk/library-product/project-routemap-asset-management-module/ and our latest book Legacy: A Decision Maker’s Guide to Infrastructure
- There is a still a long way to go to shift from a construction delivery and short-term profit focus to planning the right assets and asset strategies in the first place. Shout out to Louise Hart working on how to succeed at infrastructure megaprojects (linkedin.com/in/louisehart750), and Johannes Paradza of Infrastructure Asset Management South Africa on how asset managers help meet the challenge of Cape Town’s infrastructure.
Resources on Wave 4, starting with Jeff’s work as Director of Infrastructure and Biodiversity at the Blue Mountains City Council
For all of these, we aim to build on friendly alliances with like-minded people and organisations.
Your input, please, on:
- In your experience, in what ways is Wave 2, strategic Asset Management, still not yet where we should be?
- Anything you already know of on Wave 3, better infrastructure decision-making in our communities?
- Inspiring examples on resilience, biodiversity, radically sustainable thinking on assets – away from grey assets?
What’s in your plan for 2026?
Asset Management is still in a bubble of self importance, directly linking or better still intergrating AMPs into service plans and making service managers responsible for them has to be the future. Its easy to ignore an AMP, when it was written by someone else, but not when the owner does. AMPs are not a panacea for AM, we need to evolve up to this realisation. The engineer classification, type and class need to change to be service and thereby budget centred. Assets exist to provide a service and its time to realise that across the spectrum.