Image from James Webb Telescope: Interacting Galaxies
After taking three months off – impressed how much surgery slowed me down! – I am taking stock.
I find I am almost totally not interested in Asset Management as a technical subject. Or rather, that I have no hope that something technical (like ‘AI’) will sort it for us.
And yet, there is still a large problem to be sorted, that surely requires new, and clever, thinking.
The Talking Infrastructure board is more or less convinced that we have not yet made Asset Management stick. In particular, to get where Penny saw 40 years ago: business as usual longer term planning to meet infrastructure demand. And more recently, planning ahead in a changing world.
One painful example is the retreat from meaningful AMPs in Australian councils, their first home.
Why infrastructure organisations don’t face the future has been a puzzle. Vested interests, for example in the construction industry, sure; lack of skill or vision in the decision-makers, yeah. Is it basically that the pain of not planning adequately doesn’t fall on the people failing to plan?
Our inability as a species to think beyond a few years?
But I am not yet that pessimistic. I don’t believe it’s biological.
What most grips me is the problem of culture. Yes, we happen to live in a peculiarly short-termist culture. But let’s, as clever people, tackle it as a Meadows-type system challenge.
In the past decade some of us have asked how we can get an organisation to plan sustainably: to have a process, a system to plan out our assets, that outlives any CEO, or any individual asset manager for that matter. A few years ago, a network of us in North America looked at how to ensure that an incoming CEO took an AMP process as given. Useful and entrenched enough not to be their focus for change.
Did we succeed anywhere?
Watch this space…
From script by Lou Cripps
Bad news for techies, but infrastructure is mostly money, business and politics.
Yes, Asset Management is about making better decisions on our physical assets. But not just any decisions: the wider, longer-term, strategy and co-ordination that organisations struggle with.
Operations already take care of immediate responses. Engineers are more than happy to focus on the technical details. Finance counts the money – but struggles to do more because it doesn’t get the honest information about the assets that it needs.
The gap that Penny Burns identified in 1984 was, first of all, planning for capital renewals to maintain the infrastructure base we already have, beyond the next year. A need most people didn’t even notice, let alone take on to fill.
In the forty years since, Penny has talked extensively about decisions for new infrastructure as well. About how the overall system needs to change to meet changing demands for service. And the impact of physical assets on the economy, the environment, our communities.
In other words, Strategic Asset Management.
In the past few years I have been asked to develop webinars and other support for better asset strategy and planning. My fundamental message is A. Strategy and planning are not the same, and B. they are complementary, and we need them both.
Over the next few weeks, we’d like to explore them both further. Starting with understanding why organisations are so bad at them.
- Asset Management planning is about the allocation of budget and resources. It therefore has plenty of opponents who only care that their own projects and assets get the money.
- Asset Management strategy requires standing back to think strategically, which many people (including CEOs) are not good at doing.
- There isn’t a formula, or a template. There are good questions, but some of them are hard, and many of them require saying no to some things, and some people. Not going along with the political clamour for simplistic solutions.
- There are vested interests – some of it bordering on corruption (who will make money from this decision?) And more who feel challenged on how they have done things in the past. Even on what they were trained to do.
What are your experiences of asset planning? What works – and what gets in the way?
Is any of it really a technical problem we can solve at our desks?
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