If Planning is the Solution, What’s the Problem?

From script by Lou Cripps

The lifecycle-based Asset Management Plan was Penny’s solution to the issue of short-term thinking.

In particular, she wanted us all to look ahead at budget requirements for renewals – replacements and refurbishments of aging assets.

But planning and lifecycle thinking are needed for other challenges, too.

For me, the fundamental point is the importance of thinking ahead. Of being proactive rather than reactive, of exploiting what we already know about our assets to stop being surprised by things we can work out ahead of time.

In a week when many of us are trying not to think about WW3, we know we don’t know everything about the future. But we need to make better use of what we do know.

The problem, 40 years on, is that so many organisations don’t.

Here are just some of the questions I would wish – fairy godmother style – everyone to be able to give better answers to.

• 101, if we think we need to build some new infrastructure asset, what will it cost to maintain and operate it?
• What are the different realistic solution options – and what opportunities will we lose in choosing any of them?
• What’s the evidence that we have understood the problem and scoped our preferred option correctly? What else has to be considered in with the capital cost – like the cost of new facilities when we buy new electric fleet, for example?
• What costs and disbenefits should we also cost into the materials we choose, such as embodied carbon or damage to other communities?
• What costs and disbenefits will continue long after the physical asset is gone (think the loss of species or habitats, long-term damage to communities)?
• Do we really have any fact basis for the costs, risks and benefits of something new, as opposed to sustaining what we have?

All of these are elements of whole life cost modelling. Too bad many organisations still don’t even use basic lifecycle costs for their budgeting or strategies.

The underlying problem… is a system that doesn’t plan for the future. Is it lack of the right skills in the right place, or vested interests?  Laziness??

One thing I am pretty sure is that it isn’t a lack of available information.

What do you think: just how bad, on a scale of 1 to 10, are our current infrastructure business cases?

Further good reading: Penny’s Infrastructure: we can afford to buy it, can we afford to keep it?  Louise Hart, Procuring Successful Mega-Projects: How to Establish Major Government Contracts Without Ending up in Court. Joseph Berechman, The Infrastructure We Ride On: Decision Making in Transportation Investment.