From one Penny Fan Club Member

The Board of Talking Infrastructure wants to thank Penny – wants to make a big, big fuss over Penny – for the immensity of what she means to us and to Asset Management.

All of us had our lives and careers changed by Penny. Without her, we wouldn’t be calling ourselves asset managers, for a start. We are doubly blessed that she is also a great friend to each of us individually.

I first knew of Penny when another important AM person in my life, David Ford, came back from a trip to Australia and New Zealand in 2001 clutching a copy both of the International Infrastructure Management Manual and an issue of Penny’s Strategic Asset Management newlsetter. Saying there were some things we therefore would not have to make ourselves, and anyway could never have done so well.

I already was sure when I met Penny in person in 2004 at ICOMS we would be fast friends, going to stay with her and Bob in Adelaide on the MESA ‘eminent speaker’ tour that summer. My life certainly was never the same after that, as the next year I went back to work with her on a job for NSW Rail Corps… and the year after to live in Sydney. Where she and I could plot some more, ending up eventually with Talking Infrastructure itself.

Of course, the price I paid for her continuous inspiration was knowing I would always been running to catch up – sometimes several large steps behind her thinking. But that was always so much fun.

One thing I am most proud of is spreading her words around North America, making sure new assets managers knew who she was and her vision for infrastructure Asset Management. She has quite a fan club of younger women around the globe, including the USA. I would like to claim I am fan #1, but there are many pioneers in the queue ahead of me.

Talking Infrastructure would like to publish your memories and appeciation of Penny. When did you first come across her? Where did you take the ideas she inspired?

The best laid plans….

Platypus Clothing UK sticker

On March 31 I retired from my job. No more salary paypackets! No more hours owed to anyone!

This is not quite the same as Penny’s retirement. Penny is not retiring from thinking, working as she is on ‘Penny’s Place’. 

I don’t intend to retire from AM either, and reserve the right still to take on interesting paid assignments. I am not quite sure yet what I am retiring into, as I managed to get a diagnosis of stage 1 cancer a few days after I formally left AMCL. 

I do know that I have been distracted by that and will need to take at least a few weeks of doing very little to recover from major surgery.

If I do not manage a regular blog for a while, apologies. Please don’t go away!

Do we know where we are going to?

From script by Lou Cripps

As infrastructure organisations start to make use of large language models (LLM) – popularly labelled artificial intelligent, though they are not actually thinking – do we know where we want them to take us?

Talking Infrastructure members are involved in some experimentation here. Blue Mountains City Council, for example, is trialling such technology to automate rural road inspections from LLM interpretation of videos of defects.

Lou Cripps is training models with curated Asset Management information. That is, instead of letting something like ChatGPT loose on all sources, weighting scripts to focus on known and reliable material like SAM newsletter articles. (Otherwise, they are biased towards financial AM, since there’s much more of that material around.)

As Talking Infrastructure looks at how such tools can help make good AM practice more accessible, and what principles we need when, not if, organisations try using LLM in decision processes such as where to schedule road maintenance:

What have you used so far? Where do you think we can make best use of LLM?

Short-term Optimism

From script by Lou Cripps

Infrastructure schemes tend to suffer from optimism bias: assuming everything will work as planned.

Focusing on benefits and forgetting some costs is one reason infrastructure projects tend not to be as good as their business cases.

But there’s a parallel problem with risk and time.

Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.*

The UK TV programme Grand Designs comes to mind in relation to projects. It doesn’t seem to matter how many years the programme has been running, or the presumption that people who appear on it will have actually watched previous episodes.  

In ambitious projects for houses, there seems to be a McCloud Law at work. People will always plan to be in by Christmas, unless they are expecting a baby (in which case they want to be in just before it is born).

In the UK, that means they are probably rushing to weatherproof the house in November, so they can get to work on the interior.  And this in turn means they are invariably dependent on it not raining until the roof and windows are installed.

So the question is, is it likely to rain in the UK in November?

There is a technical corollary to this: that the glass for the windows will be delivered late, in any case.  Apparently all builders know this.

*Coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979). McCloud after Grand Designs’ presenter Kevin McCloud.

Do we know where we are coming from?

125348823 | Our History © Jakub Krechowicz | Dreamstime.com

More than a decade ago, Penny Burns set up an AM history group in LinkedIn. Her idea was firstly to collect people’s own stories, of how they came to be involved in Asset Management.

Last year Talking Infrastructure published Penny’s own history, of how she came to create Asset Management in 1984 and her first decade working with it. (The Story of Asset Management.)

From when AM really took off in the 1990s, it’s much harder to collect all the strands, and the stories include many other people. That’s why volume two of the history would look very different.

I am still fascinated by the personal journeys – not least because it brings out what distinguishes AM from other disciplines (why do people leave engineering, for example?)

I also have things when I teach about the wider history, but these really come from the people I have met, that I have happened to meet.  And what I remember of what they said twenty or twenty five years ago, that they may not even agree with (or remember in the same way).

And the internet, even with AI, doesn’t cover most of it. We erase it when we rewrite a website, unless we consciously refer to what came before (or look up old sites in an archive project).  I cannot find that old LinkedIn group, even though I don’t think anyone actually removed it.

Perhaps it’s natural that some only really think about history, and legacy, as they come to the end of their working lives. When you first meet a topic like Asset Management, you just know it’s there, not where it came from.

But it seems to me that asset managers ought to be interested, because we must have a good sense of time and change to do our jobs. “If you don’t know your history, you don’t know where you’re coming from,” as Bob Marley nearly put it. Understanding what’s happened before is the base material for having any sense of what may happen next, in ideas as well as deterioration curves.

Volume 2 is not yet a project. But Talking Infrastructure is planning longer articles on key topics such as planning and risk, and how to mine SAM newsletter material. Not the final word on anything, probably, but the next word, or part of the picture. A resource that can help us remember.

Watch this site for some more notes on our collective history.

And share your own story and memories of how it evolved for you.

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.

The Platypus Dilemma

If Asset Management is to deliver better asset planning, we have a challenge. Are we living up to it?

The most obvious thing about AM is that it’s about physical assets. And for most of its history, the assumption has been that the main quality of an asset manager is that they need a background in those areas most concerned with physical assets: that is, engineering, operations, or maintenance.

Who else knows or cares about physical assets?  And without that interest, AM might be unmoored: a branch of finance or corporate planning that simply doesn’t know or care enough.

The dilemma is that we need other skills that don’t come for free with delivery backgrounds.

Worse, we need perspectives that definitely go against what we learn in engineering school, or the motivation of operations.

  • How do we nurture a profession of people who really like the realities of physical assets but think in a new way about them?
  • How early do we need to reach potential asset managers?

There are some good signs – Dr Monica Beedles’ Street Smarts and Biz Smarts, for example, and the Canadian Network of Asset Managers (CNAM) work on AM competences. (And shout out to pioneers of new ways of getting to undergraduates – hello, Valerie Marcolengo!)

But, as CNAM points out, we have a chronic shortage of asset managers.

And many who struggle in post without the tools of effective asset management planning.

How do we reach those with the environmental, analytical, process, culture change and bigger picture skills we need?

What is your ideal undergraduate syllabus to grow the next generation of asset managers?  

Thanks to the British Columbia South Island AM Community of Practice for the opportunity to discuss competences this week!

What’s it all about?

From script by Lou Cripps

What’s the responsibility of Asset Management? In my mind, there’s no question.

The output from an effective Asset Management system is a better allocation of resources to physical assets.  It’s all about allocating $ and people where they are most needed, and not to spend or do where that is not needed.

And that can mean only one thing. AM – the system, not the team – should be the major input to the budgeting process for asset-intensive sectors such as power.  And a major input wherever there is a significant amount of budget at stake.

The Asset Management input to the budgeting process is what Penny originally called the AMP. Given that ISO 55000 didn’t quite get it, I wonder if we should now spell it out – the asset management planning process (AMPP). One integrated, co-ordinated process that looks across the whole asset base with consistent principles on which to base decisions about priorities for the medium and long term. 

We should expect – hope, indeed! – that this will over time have a major impact on business budgeting. That asset-related budgets will change significantly when we have a more optimising system, to make better use of information and plan further into the future.

The focus is not individual decisions, but the wider decision processes.

  • What are the priorities for asset renewals, that is major work to replace or refurbish assets?
  • What is the appropriate level of planned maintenance to optimise cost, risk and performance?
  • Given the current state of the asset base, what is a realistic level of allocation to reactive work going forward?
  • How do any growth or new assets fit within the overall strategy (and how important are they in relation to sustaining the assets/ services we already have)?

And this is not planning just about the physical assets. Both the money and the resources have to be considered: there is little point in arguing for money if there is not also a realistic plan for the people to deliver the work.

If we agree this is what Asset Management has to deliver, that also tells us what the main job of a dedicated AM function is and its key relationships with other functions.  We can work through what kind of skills and capabilities we require, and where AM sits in the organisation.

It’s why I don’t consider Asset Management in any sense a sub-branch of Engineering – or the capabilities what we teach on current engineering degrees.  It’s also not Finance, or HR, or Procurement, though it involves all of these.

And the bigger the amount of dollars at stake, the more vital that we do good Asset Management.

Talking Infrastructure is looking again at the AMP and the asset planning we require for future-friendly infrastructure. If you would like to be involved, contact us!

Regu-relations

44169003 © Shea R Oliver | Dreamstime.com

Regulation can be an admission of failure – failure of a sector to do what it should do.

And the realisation that many organisations only take Asset Management seriously because some branch of government tells them they must can seem like our failure, failure to convince them AM is for their own benefit.

And some stop doing it when they are no longer pushed…

What incentivises someone in a position of some power in a public agency to do the right thing? More particularly, what encourages them to think longer term?

CEOs and other senior managers have several kinds of short-term incentives: personal annual targets and maybe bonuses. Local politicians with their own short-term ambitions for re-election. Immediate approval or disapproval from their communities.

Public-sector managers can pick up assumptions about their careers from the private sector. Moving onward and upward by moving organisations – or moving on before anything catches up with you.

On the other hand, whatever their views on their own careers, people in government regulations are normally set the objective of improving the efficiency and effectiveness of what they are regulating over time.

Of course there are poor regulations, and poor regulators. One urgent concern is governments depriving regulators of teeth and funding to enforce the regulations – the UK Environmental Agency’s ability to enforce the law on sewage releases into rivers, for example.

But overall, their incentives are far more aligned to longer-term Asset Management than the average manager. They realise they can’t change things overnight, that it’s about processes and competences and a longer-term perspective. The regulators I have known are generally firm, but patient. They know they have to be.

Infrastructure is too important to be left to ambitious executives alone.

Are we working closely enough with the regulators?

Jump in at the deep end

From script by Lou Cripps

Sometimes, it feels too much to do it all step by step.

Most organisations I work with don’t yet have any asset plans beyond five years. Some still only have annual budgets. How do you add in changing requirements for the longer term if you don’t even ask past five years?

And how many years ago did asset managers realise you can’t plan if you don’t think about where you want to get to?  (At least 20, because strategy comes before planning in BSI PAS-55 published in in 2004.)  But almost no-one has properly strategic ‘asset strategies’.  They literally don’t know where they want to take their assets.

Bit by bit – and maybe getting nowhere fast.

But there is an alternative, maybe. Can we describe a compelling vision of where we want to be, first?

Can we even leapfrog some of the gradualist things we currently do?

Gradualism may be personal preference, or professional training.  We haven’t always been bold about our mission. Some of us are detail people.

How would it be if we really believed we have a duty of care to make a big difference to the, frankly, fairly dumb way we’ve conventionally managed infrastructure?

Todd Shepherd and Julie DeYoung describe this as a system thing. What we have is a system, or paradigm, which resists change – so tinkering at the edges doesn’t work, because the old system will just bounce back as soon as you stop pushing.

This is, of course, quite a different concept of ‘system’ from the parts and pieces idea of a ‘quality management’ approach such as ISO 55000, which instead encourages a bit by bit, start with AM policy or SAMP. Better than thinking the first step has to be IT – but possibly no more ‘sticky’.

Quicker, and less heartache, to go for undermining the whole thing with strategy and long-term planning from the start?