Photograph by Andréa Farias Farias, Herdi no pedaço., CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83076806
In 2018 Penny Burns and Jeff Roorda suggested we describe our history in revolutions; a month ago, Penny proposed the history of Asset Management is more like Waves.
The First Wave of AM was to establish an asset inventory. We needed to know what we had to manage before we felt we could do anything else.
The Second Wave was to do something useful with this information: Strategic Asset Management, or better decisions to get a better answer in terms of cost, risk and performance. Of course, once we started actually using the data, we became much more aware of data quality and coverage. The need for good information didn’t go away. The best Asset Management practitioners are mostly still in Wave 2 – but already looking beyond it, for example in response to Covid-19.
The coming Third Wave is what Talking Infrastructure is all about. How to use what we have learned – all that data, sure, but more what’s involved in making better asset decisions – and look ‘up and out’ to the questions of what infrastructure our communities really need now, and into the uncertain future?
In March this year, after lockdown began, three of us – Penny Burns, Ruth Wallsgrove, and Lou Cripps of Denver Area transit agency RTD, across three continents – took the framework of the Three Waves and explored what this means to us in practice. Talking Infrastructure is happy here to deliver Part 1 of the recording, the first in an on-going series called Thinking Infrastructure Aloud that we intend not merely as audio downloads but public podcasts.
You get to be the pilot for this, and so: it is even more vital that you comment, and give us feedback on our move into sound!
1. How do our experiences match your own?
2. How to ride these Waves into the future?
3. And do you like this audio?
NOTE: Part 2 of The Waves Podcasts is also now available at www.TalkingInfrastructure.com
How can you plan for the unknown – when you literally cannot see your own hand in front of your face? Well, back 12 years ago, when she headed up the Strategic Asset Management Team at RailCorp (now Sydney Trains) I facilitated a scenario planning exercise for Ruth Wallsgrove. The scenario we looked at was an epidemic with an immediate impact on ridership, with everyone – although, of course, we didn’t call it that – ‘social distancing’. Now over to Ruth to look at the implications that has for us today. PB.
The importance of planning
“Emergencies are overrated as a response mechanism. Are preparation, prevention, and planning about to become more popular alternatives? Can we nudge this? “
Planning – that is, thinking ahead and co-ordinating what we are going to do – appears to be central to dealing with Covid-19. We do not know for certain what the conclusions will be, except that South Korea seems to be doing well, and the USA not.
The nature of planning
I teach AM to a lot of people, and quite a lot of them ask how you can plan when you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen. The answer is, of course, that it is even more important to plan when you don’t know exactly what will happen. The point is to give yourself a framework for flexibility. No planning ahead at all gives you nothing to work with.
It would not have been a sensible plan to stockpile ventilators. And there was no possibility to stockpile Covid-19 test kits, because they didn’t exist. Good planning instead would be putting in place the thinking processes that would enable us quickly to ramp up production of known equipment, and to come up with new tests and vaccines.
Scenario Planning
Scenario planning seems to me to be the opposite of Planning with a capital P: the opposite of a high up committee coming up with a visionary Plan for transforming our infrastructure.
The idea of scenario planning is to look at alternative scenarios, and ask what the data tells us. It’s to consider what to do if the future doesn’t go the direction you want it to. What you can influence. How you can stay nimble to respond to what reality tells you.
The Chain of Consequences
In our scenario planning session in 2008 we were asked to consider – Could an epidemic lead to an increasein ridership?
Trains and buses are currently empty not just because people don’t want to be in a small space with many other people, but because many of us are in lockdown. Our workplaces have closed and, if we are lucky, we are working from home. (If we are not… we are out of our paying job, temporarily or permanently).
What if: people go on being nervous about crowded spaces after we go back to whatever the new normal is?
Well, one possibility is that everyone heads to their cars with a vengeance. But what if that led to impossible traffic jams, as most cities already had no spare capacity for personal vehicles?
What if: someone comes up with a neat way to avoid breathing germs on each other? This was one of our scenarios. How could the chain of consequences lead to an increase in ridership? It’s not even hard to do, once you free yourself from thinking you ‘know’ what people will do, or should do, in future.
Along with scenario planning, we also need the skills to go beyond the immediate, and ask what the knock-on impact of one event on another. Such as the basics of AM: if I build this rail line, what will that mean for operating expenditure for the next thirty years? What does it mean I can’t do, because I’ve dedicated resources to this rail line instead of that arts centre? What are possible impacts on our overall capabilities – including the environment? (There is always another Plan, but no Planet B…)
The role of Asset Management practitioners
In late 2018, when a wire down led to a wildfire that burned down a town in California, much attention was paid to control the spread and mitigate the fallout. The AM team were involved, however, not in initiatives to look at the urgent immediate risk, but rather in the important task of what to put in place to reduce such risks in the future. So often, as we know, the urgent drives out the important.
We are not emergency planners; that’s an honourable discipline in its own right. Our job is to consider scenarios and chains of consequences (“and then what?”) and building flexibility into our asset systems and our processes.
And our Question Today:
What steps can we, as Asset Managers, start taking to prepare for the next pandemic?
We all admire the excellence of precision teams like the Red Arrows, the RAF Aerobatics team. Sheer magic! But, believe it or not, your job in building an asset management team is harder! This is the fifth and last excerpt of “Building an Asset Management Team” by Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps. Sorry about that! But you can now get the whole thing from AMAZON. No Asset Management team should lead without it!
Five: What is required of the AM lead?
AM is as much a business and communication function
as a technical one in practice.
Whoever you select to run the AM team, they must have:
1. Some good team management skills – or be actively developed in these
2. Communication skills to communicate and co-ordinate both upwards to senior leadership and external stakeholders (for example Boards for public agencies and other politicians), with delivery functions, particularly closely with Maintenance, and with key support functions such as Finance, Procurement, and IT. They have to take the main responsibility for buying the organization into good practice AM processes.
3. The ability to inspire the actions of others towards a common aim. Not only is AM about alignment to shared targets, it’s also hard to implement, and so needs people who are inspired.
4. Understanding of the importance of good business processes themselves!
We would also include be willing to be wrong, and continue to move forward.
It should go without saying that they need to understand Asset Management, and at a minimum this means they have been through some training. Recruiting someone from another organization who has already done AM is of course a great idea – if you can find them. Demand wildly outstrips supply of experienced AM practitioners in North America, and indeed elsewhere.
Who is selected sets the tone and will need to lead the effort
up and down the organization.
Lou: they must be a leader and not just a manager. This will include knowing the direction to take the team and the abilities to get others to want to help get there. They protect and care for the individuals, the team and believe in the cause themselves.
The lead is not required to be the technical expert: they have to be okay with surrounding themselves with experts who know more than they do.
!Warning!
You are building Asset Management practitioners and leads for others!
If you build a good team, there is one thing you need to prepare for: that they will get head-hunted away by other agencies looking for someone with real Asset Management experience. This just happened to RTD’s AM Division.
Both of us find this personally painful – we tend to love our teams and the good people in them – but of course it is part of developing good AM more widely. It’s probably wise to assume that, since some of them will move, it’s worth encouraging them in good management and leadership skills all along. And you have to want the best for the individuals on your team, otherwise you won’t be a good lead yourself.
Some thoughts on AM team culture from Lou
I am extremely fortunate to work with great people.
But a good team isn’t just a collection of good people, although that is a huge part. To build the right team, we need to be clear on what the team would do, and what ‘we’ wouldn’t do. How will we work together to achieve collective goals: team culture.
Essentially, we need to do this through a Plan-Do-Check-Act approach:
•Clarity about the enabling attitudes – a vision of the target culture, and a clear sense of what the culture is at the moment and how it falls short of what’s needed
•Communicating and encouraging these in different ways to reach different groups
•Actively look for ways to measure and monitor this change
•Review and adjust change strategy from lessons learnt
We have to create the right environment, where it is ‘safe to explore’: creating enough safety for people to be happy to go out in to the new, the unknown. There are some rules, and the leader will play a fair referee on them.
Asset Management is not the only area in our society that can have challenges with experts. We don’t mean that we need less expertise, or should not listen to people who know more than we do. But an increasing amount of research suggests that people who identify as experts come with their own blind spots; and that being smart and well educated, and knowing it, can make for worse, not better decisions.
The real issue is assuming you know more than you do – lacking humility about what you don’t know, and believing that what you know is enough. ‘To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail.’
In the world of asset decisions, no one person ever knows enough.
This book should be in every AM office, and at less than $9.99 it won’t even make a dent in your budget. So do it! Here is the Amazon link. Need more encouragement? Then read our 4th excerpt and find out who to have in your team.
Four: What kind of people does an AM team require?
Considering what is required – and the world now has nearly 30 years’ experience of what it takes to make Asset Management work, starting in Australasia and from the late 1990s in Europe – it is not surprising that dedicated AM roles do not suit everyone, and many organizations have made some mistakes in their AM appointments.
It is also true that the different requirements of a well-rounded AM team will always make it unlikely, even undesirable perhaps, that one individual would hold all the necessary skills and experience. Instead, we need each team member to have confidence in their own strengths and complement each other towards a common purpose – very much like the ideal Asset Management organization writ large.
Any AM team requires a balance of people.
- Asset Management is a bridge between business strategy and technical delivery, and therefore must consider the right balance of attributes and skills to deliver this.Bluntly, an Asset Management team that is purely technical, or alternatively has no experience with assets, will struggle. Some experience in the team on front line delivery and, even better, existing relationships with the front line, especially maintenance, is invaluable, but AM also needs good analysis skills and business understanding.
- More challenging for some technical people is the need for good communication skills. Since AM implementation is hugely about communicating what AM is about and facilitating the improvements, AM practitioners must at least value communicating.
- AM functions have to see themselves as promoting, influencing and coordinating rather than directly delivering. (Wally Wells of Asset Management British Columbia calls this the folded arms approach.) This means developing good relationships with a range of other teams. AM practitioners have to be able to acknowledge and respect what other people know, and have some detachment, because their role is to bring together different teams and types of experience & knowledge into asset strategies and integrated planning, not to try to impose their own opinions on asset decisions. They must have a big picture view of the business such that they understand concerns within silos but can explain the needs of the entire organization to put the concerns into context.
- Another specific requirement is for people who can ‘embrace uncertainty’, since AM is at its heart about planning for the future – and the future is always uncertain. For example, ProGas in the Netherlands in the early 2000s focused on promoting smart technical people into asset planning: the only ones who succeeded were those who could cope with making decisions on clearly imperfect knowledge and data. Many could not.
When Penny Burns took the RailCorp Strategic Asset Management team managers through Scenario Planning training, the most important outcomes were making everyone feel a little less certain about the future for the railway – and set us to thinking hard about what data would indicate a real trend.
- The ability to think probabilistically is not intuitive, but it is of great value and can be learned. Those that have developed their understanding of probabilities can use this thinking to help address the uncertainty that is essential to describing systems, predicting outcomes, and influencing outcomes.
- A structured approach to problem solving, even to questions where there isn’t an obvious right answer, or the exact answer can’t be known, is important. AM practitioners should be curious and ask questions, working to discover root causes.
The strongest AM practitioners seem to know when there isn’t a single correct answer, and what set of constraints should be used to move forward with the next best alternative.
An Asset Manager has to be comfortable saying, “I don’t know.”
- It’s also vital to be able to see what is important, the AM principle of criticality, and the balance of ‘cost, risk and performance’ in what we do ourselves.
- AM implementation is about change, so generally will not suit anyone who primarily seeks stability or following the old rules. We need people who have some social skills and ability to build good working relationships, at the same time that they will push for change, in other words stand up for new ways of working.
- Continual improvement requires a desire to learn new concepts and ideas, even when the evidence overturns what you expect. Continual improvement requires a place of pause and reflection before the next Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle is commenced.
- Leadership skills to get others to buy into our new ways of thinking and working.
And the ability to balance the natural tensions that exist between all of these skills….
This is hopefully not to completely depend on unicorns – or platypuses – that we may never find.
We are looking for an odd and tricky combination of attributes. Instead of searching for a very rare and sought after amphibious, duck-billed, otter-footed, egg-laying, beaver-tailed, venomous mammal that locates pray through electroreception – it’s easier to provide all the things we need through a complementary team.
It is also important to understand what skills we don’t need because they exist in other areas and within the asset class groups. We don’t need to be experts in all areas if we can coordinate with others.
RTD’s AM Division looks for these attributes in everyone it hires:
- Highest ethics and integrity
- Cognitive ability
- Objectivity and self-awareness
- Basic numeracy
- Effectiveness
- Curiosity / lifelong learner
- Problem solving
- Humility
- Initiative / motivation and grit
A good sense of humor also helps.
This is part 3 of the 5 part series by Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps on Building an Asset Management Team.
Three: What are the key activities required of an AM team?
Penny Burns identifies three phases (or ‘revolutions’) that it is worth considering when you look at building up AM capabilities.
First, there is ‘Asset Inventory’: ensuring we actually know what assets we manage, where they are, what condition they are in, cost, expected life and their type and model and age.
If you have poor asset information, you have little choice but to start here.
The next stage is what she calls ‘Strategic Asset Management’, in other words ‘Optimization’: using this data, along with our understanding of the assets and asset systems, to begin to optimize at every level. This is where it starts to get interesting.
What does this require from the Asset Management team?
- Co-ordinating the integrated Asset Management Plan
- Leading the implementation of Asset Management, including AM training
- The development and implementation of co-ordinated, whole life asset strategies both at class and system level
- Key role in defining the asset information strategy (but not doing the IT or entering data – which are a waste of AM skills)
- Focus for improved asset decision techniques and models to do the optimizing
Other potential responsibilities of an AM team include helping to define the top level KPIs or Levels of Service. If Asset Management is about aligning asset decisions and plans to the organizational objectives, the first issue for many North American organizations is that the latter aren’t well defined. Sometimes, that inevitably means AM practitioners have to be involved in helping to define them. (And that is explicit for levels of service in ON Reg 588/17.)
It seems inevitable that Asset Management also has to take an active role in developing an overall organizational risk management framework, even if the lead is taken by a specific corporate risk function. This is not just because this is a key requirement in ISO 55000 back to back with ISO 31000; good AM depends on a solid and consistent risk framework across the organization and across all risks. Physical assets can impact on just about every corporate objective, which means they can also contribute to just about every type of risk you have.
Penny believes skilled AM practitioners are key to the next revolution, too: better ‘Infrastructure Decision Making’, by which she means society making better decisions for new infrastructure, especially in a time of change and new technologies such as we face now. Technologists and traditional ‘Planning’ are not experienced in the practicalities of managing complex asset systems, and without this real expertise, we are unlikely to make best use of opportunities.
Note: Talking Infrastructure was specifically created
to explore and develop this third stage, or ‘next revolution’.
Next week we look at what kind of people an AM Team requires.
Photo by Steve Johnson from Pexels
Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps continue their series on Building an Asset Management Team. Their book is to be published in February. More information to come.
Two: Why you need an AM team
Experience around the world over nearly 30 years strongly suggests the need for a specific, dedicated AM team to be accountable for the implementation and improvement of asset decision, asset risk and long-term optimized asset planning processes.
You can’t just think things better. To improve, there must be action,
and people with responsibility for those actions.
Specifically, ISO 55000 defines AM as the ‘coordinated’ activities of an organization to realize value from its assets. Co-ordination takes real effort, not just a general wish to co-ordinate.
This is no different than other functional teams within your organization where expertise and specialization deliver value. If it is your plan to deliver the AM capabilities, you need to be intentional in adding this competency to your organization.
The likelihood of hitting a target you haven’t specified
or aren’t aiming at is low.
Without a focal point, organizations struggle to do more than isolated improvements, and generally lack a framework or structure to bring together the different activities around assets.
What most will fail to achieve, without at least a small dedicated team, includes:
- The development of whole life strategies for the assets
- Integrated long term asset planning: someone has to do the co-ordination, develop the processes, and build the relationships across functions to bring them together
- Asset risk management beyond safety, general corporate risks, or a high level risk register
- Ownership of the Asset Management system and AM objectives
Take it seriously
It also looks fairly impossible to implement good Asset Management if you have no-one who knows much about it. Rule of thumb: you need at least two people who have been on an Asset Management course to begin.
We might go further and suggest that if there is no-one who is prepared to identify as an Asset Management professional, dedicated to getting themselves and their colleagues developed in Asset Management skills, a company doesn’t really know what to do or how to go about it.
It is easy in this area to be unconsciously incompetent – not even to know what you don’t know.
If no-one in the organization really knows what Asset Management means, they can be sold a line by, a consultant who doesn’t know either. Real examples include organizations who decided Asset Management is an implementation of work management IT, a.k.a. an ‘Enterprise Management System’; or that it equates to reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Both are very useful tools, but they aren’t a transformation of the business in themselves, and can be expensive, painful and applied wrongly.
Asset Management is about people, relationships, assets and strategies. You need an AM leader that has some knowledge of each. Leadership is a skillset beyond technical knowledge or management proficiencies. So it is worth careful thought about who can deliver this to the organization.
AM is a better way to manage our asset base overall.
For an asset-intensive sector like Public Transit,
that means how we do business overall.
Photo by Steve Johnson from Pexels
Building an AM Team is like creating a piece of abstract art. What makes it work? The choice of colour, shape, positioning, the passion? All of this, and more! A practitioner’s eye and experience definitely counts. This month, Talking Infrastructure is running excerpts from a new USA guide to Building an Asset Management Team, co-written by one of TI’s long-time collaborators, Ruth Wallsgrove, together with Lou Cripps, who heads up the Asset Management Division at the Regional Transportation District in Denver. It will be available shortly – and we will let you know when and how to get hold of it.
One: Building an Asset Management Team
‘Building an Asset Management Team’ is intended as a practical guide for any infrastructure agency interested improving overall Asset Management. It is our response to common questions around staffing to perform the functions and competencies required to support an effective Asset Management system.
Asset Management carries the flag for good asset stewardship, the responsibility that comes with managing critical infrastructure assets. We owe this to current and future generations.
‘Planning brings the future into the present
so we can do something about it now.’
This includes understanding the intergenerational liabilities that are delivered with all longer life assets, and that once something is gone, it can’t always be replaced. We cannot take a better future for granted; we need to work hard each day to bring a better future into reality.
We have to stop making asset decisions in silos, and start to join up the dots. For example, a decision to electrify a bus fleet has to be made with the full understanding of the interdependencies between fleets and facilities. The type of propulsion system in buses isn’t a decision that can come from strategic planning or engineering alone.
A basic question for AM practitioners is: And then what? We build a shiny new rail line. What is it going to take to operate and maintain it successfully and sustainably for the next fifty years or more? We buy a new fleet: how will it interact both with the other assets and systems we already have, and with our existing skills and processes?
The Challenge
The challenge for US Transit Agencies, and other sectors wanting to implement Asset Management, is finding the right people and assigning committed resources to its delivery.
Asset Management is increasingly important – yet there are few
experienced AM practitioners, and even fewer useful resources
on how to develop an AM team.
The thirty years since Asset Management began to be established in Australia and New Zealand – and much less time in many places – is not long to establish a stream of trained and experienced people. AM is still not taught at undergraduate level, and only partially on a few post graduate courses up until now. It isn’t included in the standard curricula of business, finance, engineering, urban planning or other relevant disciplines.
The demand for Experienced AM teams is increasing
Add into these the now legislated requirements in North America for Asset Management, such as Ontario Regulation 588/17, or the US Federal Transportation Administration TAM rules, that require at least knowledge of it in those regulated organizations, and the demand wildly outstrips supply for anyone with any AM experience.
This guide is based on our personal experiences; it reflects the views of us as authors rather than representing our employers, any institution or the wider AM community. Neither of us could write this document alone.
If you are
- developing a business case for setting up an AM team,
- establishing a team,
- considering where to locate an AM team in the organizational structure, or
- wondering how to find and attract the staff you need.
this guide will be invaluable.
To come:
- Why you need an AM team
- What are the key activities of an AM team?
- What kind of people does an AM team need?
- What is required of an AM lead?
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