At this end of 2024, I am more convinced than ever that the whole point of Asset Management is Planning.
Planning, as opposed to delivery – which we have been doing for decades, if not centuries. Asset Management is about thinking through what we need to deliver across our asset base, Plan before Do. (Don’t just do something, sit there.)
That is what Penny created Asset Management for.
And the central concept was lifecycle modelling, supported by cost-risk-optimisation, matched to understanding demand. When is the right time to replace, renew, maintain? What don’t we need to do?
The AMP has been the centre of Asset Management since the very beginning. As captured in state and federal requirements, as documented in the International Infrastructure Management Manual from the IPWEA.
We need Planning – and it is not going to happen without us.
But it is too often still – after 40 years! – fragmentary, driven by vested interests (even the understandable wish by people on the ground to get money for their own assets).
It doesn’t look at what happens next: ‘And then what?’
And I can count the organisations I work with that actually do lifecycle cost modelling or cost-risk optimisation on the fingers of two hands.
To do the maths on all the major costs, risks and benefits of different options across the lifecycle, and demonstrate that (for example) building back rural roads like for like after they have been washed away for the fourth time in five years simply doesn’t add up.
Time for a Campaign for Honest Asset Management Planning?
Among my personal highs and lows of 2024, the standout experience was going to Japan.
I am sorry to say I have never encountered a Japanese Asset Manager, but thanks to GFMAM I got to hear a rep from the Japanese maintenance societies at the IAM UK conference in London last month.
Despite what we hear about its economy, the country is still doing very well on total maintenance and quality in manufacturing. Some days it seems every other car on our roads is a Toyota.
And my overriding sense of Japan? That along with the incredible food and gardens and manufacturing, it’s simply the most sensible society I have ever seen.
Starting with the toilets at Tokyo airport when we arrived.
I have long suspected the most important thing about Asset Management is that it is sensible. Don’t spend where you don’t need to, but do what you must to sustain what we need to thrive. Don’t preach growth for its own sake, and be wary of ‘innovation’ (think of ‘the Maintainers’ and their 2020 book The Innovation Delusion*). What does the evidence tell us? What risks are we really running with our assets? Cut through the lobbying and classical economics – and make sensible decisions.
Sensible is not necessarily glamorous; AM is not glamorous. It doesn’t pander to fantasies, of engineering or entrepreneurs.
As several Western countries seem to lose the plot, even caught up in what can only be described as fascist dreams, it was wonderful to experience somewhere that has a much stronger sense of its limits. A lot of people in a limited space, and some of that physical space quite dodgy: how can we organise food, rub along with millions of strangers without pulling guns on each other, love nature (trees!), create beautiful things? Value education, and don’t take our gods too seriously.
Take what we need, and reject what we don’t.
Yes, I am hopelessly romantic about Japan, ever since my father worked there when I was a child. But I didn’t expect to come away with sensible.
PS not sure I will ever be happy with cold toilet seats again.
* The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most
Note: Japan, like many countries including the UK, USA, China and France, not to mention Germany and Russia, has some dismal history. Unlike some of those countries, it appears to be able to learn from its past, but this is not to excuse its treatment of Korea and China and prisoners of war in the past.
I have just been to the 30 year celebration of the Institute of Asset Management (IAM) in London, where we also marked ten years of ISO 55000. This was held jointly with the Global Forum on Maintenance and Asset Management (GFMAM) – representing AM and AM-minded maintenance societies worldwide – with representatives from IPWEA and the Asset Management Council. A time to reflect as well as celebrate!
Russ Seiler of Grant Public Utility District (one of the Columbia River hydro utilities in the Pacific North West) reflected on his journey since 2016. Starting from scratch as an Asset Management lead, under Russ the team at Grant has looked at asset inventory, Wave 1, and the absence of basic asset data. It then focused on the AM ‘system’, as in ISO 55000, and the idea of building AM artefacts. (Wave one-and-a-half?) But, encouraged by Penny’s 2023 book on the beginnings of AM, he realised that neither were really the point.
His conclusion after seven years? “If your asset management program never affects the money being spent on assets, your program should and will be terminated.” AM creates the machine that produces the plan, a better plan for the assets. Everything else is just a means to that end.
It’s the AMP process, ok.
I have trained many 1000s in the last 14 years, in the USA and elsewhere. And that’s what I have found, too. Too many get caught up in asset data – which is important, sure – and documents such as the AM Policy and SAMP, which are also important. But that is never what Penny meant by Asset Management.
And ‘plan’ doesn’t just mean what proactive maintenance you should do, or what you need to spend capital on to sustain your existing asset base. It’s also what if any new infrastructure we require. It’s whole of life and system-wide. It’s big.
Have we been tinkering at the edges while the world changes around us?
What makes an effective asset management practitioner? Ruth Wallsgrove ,who founded IAM’s Asset Magazine in 2004, recently contributed this opinion piece to the magazine in which she shared some of her experience in working around the globe. Our thanks to IAM for permitting reproduction here.
On the steering group to review the IAM Competences Framework, we discussed the distinction between the things we needed to know about and things we actually have to be able to do for ourselves. That is between what we need to appreciate other people doing, and what we have to take main responsibility for.
A useful way I have found to think about asset management capabilities generally is: what won’t get done if we don’t do it? What key competences should we expect not to be there, if we don’t have them?
This means areas such as IT, Engineering and Finance are fields we should understand, but we don’t necessarily need to have hands-on skills or previous experience in them. There are plenty of other people, other professionals, looking after them.
On the other hand, we have to be the ones to understand good asset management practice, and to communicate this and its benefit across our organisations. Who else could do this? Communication, facilitation and change management of attitudes are often called ‘soft’ skills, but that doesn’t reflect how hard many of us find them in practice.
Information and risk
I have become increasingly interested in in two other areas vital for effective asset management that we cannot depend on anyone else to know how to do. They probably are not there anywhere else in our organisations, especially as applied to physical assets. And they are not in any sense ‘soft’.
First of all, we need to ensure we have the skills to understand what information about our assets can and cannot tell us. This isn’t about IT, data collection or even quality assurance, but about interpreting data. The realm of data science, including statistics, is crucial here. Some of the best asset managers I’ve worked with have exceptional data-analysis skills – some even teach data science at college or have backgrounds in military intelligence. Once you’ve seen a true expert in action, it’s clear that asset management is incomplete without these skills. (It’s a shame that many of us didn’t enjoy statistics in college!)
A second, related area of concern is risk management. The whole realm of managing physical assets has up to now been – well, how can I put this delicately – naive about risk. We still struggle to quantify risk, as if actuaries didn’t exist. The basic issue may not just be that we have been ignorant (and I am talking about myself here), but that we’ve been positively resistant to handling uncertainty.
Embracing uncertainty
Twenty years ago, Ype Wijnia from ProGas in the Netherlands alerted our community to the problem of relying on people who don’t like to work with uncertainty On those whose previous education, and maybe natural preference, leans towards knowing for sure, or relying on rules to give the right answer.
But that just isn’t asset management, it’s all about making decisions and planning for the future. The one thing you can be sure about is that you don’t know everything. You can’t know everything.
We have to ‘embrace uncertainty’, as Chris Lloyd, who previously chaired the IAM work on competences, put it – and use the tools and concepts for managing risk that have been there for years in other professions.
Looking across these key competences, i suspect we’ve relied too much on the skills that individuals bring across from engineering or finance. We’ve lingered too log in our old comfort zones. We should not expect that what we have learnt from previous education and experience is adequate on its own.
We should expect any asset manager to go on learning and exploring areas that may be quite different to what we’ve done before. New tools, new concepts, jumping happily into the unknown.
Curiosity may well be the most important asset management competence of all.
Penny and Ruth at AM Peak gala dinner, April 16 2024
Since I last posted I have spent a month celebrating 40 years of Asset Management in Australia with Penny, Jeff and Gregory; gone to one of my favourite conferences in Minneapolis; taught an advanced AM course to some sophisticated AM practitioners in Calgary, as well delivering to as a post ISO 55000 certification client in California.
I have been thinking about where AM needs to go next, at the same time as worrying that things have not moved far enough.
And it just keeps coming back to: We Need to Raise our Game. And not because what Penny kicked off four decades ago hasn’t made a huge difference already.
But I want us to do more.
First, to effect what Penny set out to do through Talking Infrastructure: to look up and out, to make a difference to key decisions on what infrastructure we really need.
Secondly, as I start to unwind from delivering basic AM training – something I have loved doing for nearly 14 years now – I reflect on our competencies.
This kicks off a series of questions and reflections on what we want to change, and how to do it.
How to interest existing AM practitioners in upskilling on risk, data analysis, culture/ system change, persuasion, strategic thinking?
How to find people who want to challenge the status quo on infrastructure projects?
What can we best offer from our collective experiences to support better decision-making?
I am looking forward to this!
Come and meet Penny and Talking Infrastructure in person! Watch this space for additional details, but here’s the programme so far:
April 15 & 16 AMPeak, Adelaide. Penny and Ruth will be at AMPeak.
April 18, Stantec, Brisbane
April 19, PACoG, Brisbane. Asset Institute, QUT, 11am- 12.30, followed by lunch. Join Joe Mathew and Kerry McGivern along with Penny and Ruth to discuss what we’ve learnt in 40 years – and look forward to the next 40. Includes a look of what is happening with asset management internationally, in this big year for AM.
April 23, Blue Mountains City Council, Katoomba, 10am to noon. Seminar with Jeff Roorda on Blue Mountains City Council planetary health and disaster recovery experience, plus update on the new advocacy project underway by IPWEA Roads and Transport Directorate (IPWEA RTD – NSW/ACT), on Lessons Learned from Disaster Recovery, to assist NSW Councils work with Local, Strate and Federal Government Agencies.
April 24, Sydney event, Dawes Point. 6-10pm Harbour View Hotel, 18 Lower Fort Street, Dawes Point, NSW 2000. Using the recent experiences of the Blue Mountains City Council, Talking Infrastructure is holding an event in central Sydney to call for urgent changes in all of our asset mindsets and tools to ensure planetary health, biodiversity and climate change resilience. Meet with Penny, Jeff, Gregory and Ruth, plus local IPWEA. Food provided thanks to AMCL.
April 30, IPWE, Melbourne. Presentation by Penny. Penny and Ruth will be at IPWE until May 3. There will also be a dinner out in Melbourne for TI friends and colleagues – please let us know if you would like to join us. And bring along your copy of Penny’s book to get signed!
If you are planning to attend our Sydney celebration, please RSVP to: amis40@talkinginfrastructure.com so we can keep an eye on numbers – limited to the first 60! Event is free, includes food and discussion with Penny Burns and Jeff Roorda and a whole heap of old friends and colleagues.
Full update of the 40th year celebration events shortly!
Join us at the Harbour View Hotel in the Rocks and help celebrate with finger food and drinks – plus Penny and Jeff on what we have learnt from the last 40 years to help us meet the challenges of the next 40.
Many thanks to Richard Edwards, Lynn Furniss and Matt Miles of AMCL
Penny Burns and Talking Infrastructure will be on the move in April to celebrate 40 years of Asset Management, and look forward to the next 40.
Adelaide April 15 & 16, Penny and Ruth will be celebrating at AM Peak.
Brisbane events April 17-19
Sydney April 24, venue TBC: Asset Valuation in a time of Climate Crisis. Including Jeff Roorda on how Blue Mountains City Council is taking a radically new approach, as well as Penny on how we must rethink our AMP modelling.
Melbourne April 30, IPWC. Penny speaking on the opening morning of IPWEA conference
Wellington May 4-6, events to be announced
Let us know if you are interested in meeting up in any of these cities.
See you in April! #AMis40
One of my great pleasures in life is to sit in a café and talk infrastructure. A popular topic, even before Lou Cripps came up with the idea Asset Managers are platypuses, is what makes an effective one? Or even what attracts us in the first place.
Who are ‘our people’?
To defend us from accusations of exclusivity, I need to point out that it’s not about what you studied at university, or which country you grew up in. Good Asset Managers are ‘anywheres’, as Ark Wingrove put it.
This is, of course, a Serious Subject, as we desperately seek to switch to a future-friendly mindset; seeing the bigger, longer picture around physical assets. But it’s also kinda fun to think about the difference that makes a difference.
Like the AM team who came on one of my courses and took me literally. We teach whole life costs, cost-risk optimisation, thinking in risk, and how information is all about decision-making. But I don’t think most attendees go away and start actually doing any of that. This team did.
One reason people don’t try whole life cost modelling, or risks in $, is because they think it’s too hard before they even start.
But my best students – well, if that was how you do Asset Management, they would figure out how to do it. When I later asked Todd Sheperd how they quantified asset risk, he said he looked it up on the internet. After reading a recommended book and going on a recommended course. (As I said, he took me literally.)
Yes, he must have had the confidence to believe he and his team could figure it out. But I think it’s more than that. It’s about curiosity and openness to learning.
It also involves a belief that if I don’t know something, someone else may have worked it out, maybe in a completely different context. We can learn from others – like 17th century gambling mathematicians, or stock markets traders.
Or actuaries. It’s as if 99% of attendees on AM courses have never heard there is a whole profession who have worked out how to put $ on risks.
Sitting in a café recently with Todd and Julie DeYoung talking about infrastructure, we also recognised another quality: interest in what we can learn from people doing something that’s not exactly the same as what we’re trying to do. Like wondering what we can learn from assets that aren’t exactly what we have – instead of deciding ‘our’ assets are so special there is nothing we can learn from others (and the processes of AM planning and modelling don’t apply to us).
In other cafés years ago with another old AM friend, Christine Ashton, we thought it’s about pattern matching. About looking at a problem we had, and the kind of technology approach it needed, as opposed to a fixation on a particular software tool, for example. What kind of problem is it? What sort of tool could help?
To me that’s linked to 80:20 thinking, but I suspect that some of my best AM buddies are better at details than me. It’s happily straying into the unknown, instead of trying to force everything to fit into what you already know.
I love (nearly) all of my students, of course. But not all of them turn out to be my sort of café people.
Shout out to yet another recent café and Janel Ulrich – her of the ‘can we develop our SAMP in the next 12 hours?’ (yes, of course we can). I love the way she loves ‘our kind of people’, in all our quirks and heartaches and irrepressible openness.
Others who will recognise their café contributions include John Lavan and Manjit Bains. And Penny, with whom too many of these café conversations have to be virtual.
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