30199342 | Happy © Michal Bednarek | Dreamstime.com
They say you should not have favourites among your children. But I found it impossible not to have favourite clients.
I always enjoyed some individuals, some asset managers in particular. More than being nice people – which they were – it was about understanding each other, speaking the same language. Many others I worked with over 30-plus years simply didn’t get what we were saying.
In another lifetime, I would love to figure out why I warmed to some regions more than others: why I loved asset managers in Indonesia, Malaysia, some Canada, west coast USA – and New Zealand, of course.
But favourite clients also include organisations run by the more visionary executives.
I did not always get near the C suite, or councillors. But my fondest working memories now are for those who were engaged. Taking me back to almost my earliest discussions about Asset Management change, about what is and is not possible unless there is a CEO who gets it.
Sometimes there were executives who almost got it, and those are not such happy memories. Some of them even know who they are, because I got to the point when I said this out loud, that they were not succeeding at Asset Management because of the bizarre choices they made. That they were the problem.
Happier to think about how much is possible if the top guys get it.
As opposed to industry sectors which believe in rapid turnover of CEOs who don’t stay around long enough to care about longer term plans.
Makes me think the ‘high reliability’ thinkers got it right about commitment.
How much real improvement on Asset Management is possible unless there is long-time leadership that cares?
39167631 | Cartoon Teeth © Tigatelu Dreamstime.com
Why do so many organisations not have good long term plans for their assets? Why don’t they stick to their Asset Management strategies?
Being continually sucked back into short term reaction is one problem for infrastructure (and the more political the sector – such as transit – the worse it is).
And forgetting. New CEO, new CFO, someone coming in that simply hasn’t thought about what they are managing. Good Asset Management isn’t built into the furniture, the basic business processes enough. Someone ignorant of AM comes in and doesn’t even know what they are abandoning.
The need for tighter regulation may be, as Lou Cripps has said, just evidence that a sector isn’t doing a good job.
But I am coming to think that mandatory audit – as in government audit offices, or even internal audit enforced by non-executives as part of good governance – may be a key infrastructure AM tool.
Infrastructure, managed on behalf of communities, is too important and too long term not to manage well. Decision makers – whether C suite, councillors, board members – must be held to account for their decisions.
Regulated audit is one practical way to do this. Not simply the kind of quality control envisaged in ISO 55000, more the kind of visibility (and check for legality) of an annual financial audit. Not perfect, but a lot more companies would cheat on their tax without it!
Audit is not judging by results, but checks you did what you said you would do, that you followed the processes that you claim to use. Such as evidence-based budgeting and business cases for investment.
A good decision can still lead to less than good outcomes – but making it well is all we have for the long term.
Scrutiny of the process is particularly important when making decisions for the long term. This requires clarity and sticking to your principles. Being able to demonstrate you know why you made a decision.
I suspect audit with teeth is a natural companion to good longer term, more strategic thinking about our physical assets.
What is your experience of regulation audit in Asset Management?
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.
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?
from script by Lou Cripps
Just a thought about current Asset Management practice.
One core tool used by many is the maturity assessment or gap analysis. See, for example, the Institute of Asset Management’s SAM+ tool.
The concept here is to audit an organisation against a standard, recognise its shortfalls against that standard, and recommend actions to close the gaps – in an implementation plan often referred to as the Asset Management roadmap. The standard could be ISO 55000 series, or perhaps more usefully the 39/now 40 subjects in the GFMAM Asset Management Landscape.
ISO 55000 has some oddities (don’t get me started here on the terms ‘SAMP’ and ‘asset management plans’), but the involvement of far more people in the revision in 2024 probably makes its coverage more realistic.
The problem with the world of AM assessments and roadmaps isn’t fundamentally which topics we assess.
It’s that we simply don’t take our own principles seriously.
Alignment with organisational objectives is surely the key organising concept in ISO 55000. And yet we still propose AM implementation against standards – rather than our corporate priorities.
We also have a history collectively of ridiculous outputs, roadmaps that detail 70 or 130 different actions, for AM teams of perhaps 2 or 3 people to implement in the next 2 years – as though we had no experience, no common sense of what it’s like to implement major change. Almost as though we aren’t taking the AM Landscape ‘red box’ Organisation & People into account at all.
In Asset Management, there isn’t a ‘right’ way to do everything. That’s engineer talk. The optimal way forward is the best realistic option for us, for where we are now, for what our organisations are trying to achieve.
Sure, there are some things which are probably always a bad idea to do, and some that are usually good. But it’s not about a set of rules. Not a template we can fill in, leaving our brains in a jar somewhere.
Whatever we call it, a top-level strategy for Asset Management is essential. But it only makes any sense as a case for how AM will contribute to our organisational targets and challenges. And the practical actions that will do most to support the overall business strategy.
Yeah, the answer is almost always going to be a better planning process for our assets.
But if we start by taking something from inside AM, like ISO 55000 or GFMAM 40 Subjects, and use that as a basis to propose priorities for implementation, we are doing what asset people have too often done before.
Ignoring the business priorities. Not being aligned, right from the start.
Instead, the first thing is to make sure we really understand the organisational challenges, by talking with the people at the top. They won’t always be crystal clear, but that’s the right terrain to start with. Perhaps we’ll even be able to assist in articulating the challenges.
Then talk about what we can realistically do with AM to meet them.*
The gap assessment we require is the gap between what AM could usefully do for our organisation and what we are actually achieving at the moment.
*In my mind, there is very little chance that the corporate priorities for infrastructure won’t require good Asset Management, urgently. We are definitely not at risk of talking ourselves out of a job.
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