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AMP’s need to be a live document, which is why the old ‘write a plan’ addage is no longer current.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.