When UK councils were encouraged to develop Asset Management Plans (AMP) in the early 2000s, local government advisors had to warn them off cutting and pasting other councils’ plans.
It is perhaps hard to think of a worse way to plan – to misunderstand what an AMP is all about. Any two councils will have different portfolios of assets, even for similar services. Different types, different ages.
How to plan for asset renewals using shared heuristics with similar organisations might have been a useful conversation.
But even if councils try to write their own plan, they can fail to use them: I love Ashley Bishop’s comment that “often the only thing that comes out an AMP is the dead spider when you open it”.
And so many organisations have struggled with the process – or rather, failing to see that planning is a business process. And a key one, not a one-off document written by someone at a desk, even if they are an Asset Manager who works for the council..
The problem is, this is so fundamental to Asset Management. That asset planning is a way of life embedded into core business as usual.
That not planning is the very problem we are trying to solve.
So, although in general I would support any regulatory requirements to do an AMP, we have to face the real paradigm shift.
How can you take responsibility for vital infrastructure assets, and not look ahead?
How did we get here?
AMP’s need to be a live document, which is why the old ‘write a plan’ addage is no longer current. We should now be able to model information in real time on demand, rather than look it up in a document. This is the role of the AM team, to be reactive and still consistent.
Ashley, I am not sure the AMP is primarily a document at all…
And I am not convinced real time data is the issue in a live plan.
Asset planning is surely about making decisions about the allocation of money, labour and other resources to physical assets, based on at least some strategy about how we want to manage each asset or asset class or asset system. Which in turn is active thinking about how to keep the assets delivering an acceptable level of service into the future.
Julie DeYoung and Todd Shepherd at Tacoma Power in the US have done some lovely work on live asset class strategies using data, but ‘real time data’ and ‘asset strategy’ don’t seem to me to exist quite in the same time frame.
Lots to discuss around all of this, but I think we have more serious gaps on longer term thinking than on keeping a one- three year capital program up to date. And keeping the latter real isn’t about real time operational data, is it? More about proper monitoring and review of capital delivery?
Thank you for your input – makes me feel we’re all on the right lines to push for better AMPs.
In the military we had an edict that ‘no plan survives first contact with the enemy’ and that ‘ a bad plan is better than no plan’. These of course mean the commanders and planners had to be able to step up to each challenge and work out the answers with the data given as the situation evolves.
There was of course strategic or tactical intent. In a business sense this is the corporate (AM) strategy, the guidelines on how and the parameters to be used.
If you have a good strategy in place and a corporate understanding of how to implement it, AMPs can then be part of the business plan or service plan. It is the service manager who will demand on the assets so they need to include this in their plan and not in a stand alone one, which seems to be what is happening now.
Someone then ties all the outcomes together to produce forecasts and predictions.
I really believe that the AM team should help service managers include the AMP in their service plans and then help the entity to review and forecast.
Also I think there is a bigger problem with 10 and 20 year forecasts conflicting with even more rapid changes, including staff turnovers and economic impacts.
An AMP can be out of date following a change of government, management, a GFC or oil crisis, thats why a five year AMP gets lost.
At Manningham council I got 3 service managers to write their AMP, the change in attitude was considerable, one even considered changing to do AM. This is where it needs to go, and should have done years ago, it also explains why AMPs sit unused, not my plan syndrome.
As for CAPEX planning in local government it often seems more about the politics than any AM forecasting.
And I can’t help thinking that the way we organise staff and departments in organisations doesn’t help either.