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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?
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?
At least the pet duck enjoyed it
When we moved into our house, we first realised the problem when the mortgage company said we needed flood insurance, and discovered that would cost ten times the normal building and contents policy.
Until a smarter insurance company here sold us a cheaper policy based on postcode (in other words, by group of two or three houses), not Environment Agency flood areas: they spotted a market opportunity for a more precise risk assessment. Smug us!
Until six years later, and the house actually did flood.
And four years on, in late 2024, the water came to our front door twice, and overtopped the sand bags the second time.
And the risk of flooding in England is predicted to increase five-fold in the next decades under current projections for global warming.
However, Newport Pagnell is not Miami.
To be clear, our flooding is due to rain, and living next to where two rivers meet. Unfortunate timing of river surges – or someone getting the timing off on floodgates. We are nowhere near the sea and don’t get hurricanes, and so far the extent of our flooding is a few inches of water at the front of the house.
A few houses flooding a bit: you start thinking about resale values, and whether getting wet every year or so will do the brick walls and wood floorboards any good.
In South Florida, they face losing whole towns to the sea and the swamps. Many people live only a few feet above current sea levels, and the infrastructure is similarly low and at risk. They have to worry about overwhelmed sewerage systems and nuclear power plants.
Florida has such a tax-averse politics that it will come down to money for school education versus money for flood action soon for some towns. They continue to build right up to the sea and in areas only just above sea level, even as they watch the hurricanes track towards them. And of course the ruling Republicans also mostly deny climate change.
It would seem a perfect storm of human inability to face the facts.
But it is striking just how much of an issue it is for infrastructure. And that involves use of tax dollars, national insurance schemes, building codes, politics and Politics: so much more than simply technical questions.
Do we speak the right language/s to manage this?
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?
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
Someone I work with in the UK nuclear industry asks in despair, how come project engineers don’t feel that the whole point of building something is for it to operate? In other words, that construction projects only exist to create something that will be used to deliver products and services.
Why aren’t they interested in the long-term use that comes after construction?
If it really is all about use, they really need to consider what is required to use the asset. They should be interested!
This isn’t just to focus on what service we need to deliver. The asset has no point unless it delivers a service that is needed. Even project engineers can get that.
What we continue to struggle with is getting asset construction engineers and project managers to consider what is needed in order to use it successfully. And this includes providing as-built data – what assets are there to operate – and thinking ahead on operating strategy, and maintenance schedules. It’s designing and building with the operations and maintenance in mind. Designing for operability and maintainability.
In infrastructure, the asset ‘users’ are often not the customers, who may never touch or even see the assets. The people who use the assets are the operators; the people who touch the assets, maintenance.
An engineering design goes through many hands before it impacts on the customer – and if those hands in between are hamstrung by designs that are poor to operate, hard to maintain, and by the incomplete thinking that ‘throws the assets over the wall’ at operations (as we used to say in the UK) without adequate information – what is the point, really?
I believe there may be something called project time, where there is no ‘after’. No ‘and then what?’ – just onto the next shiny thing to build.
Thanks again to Bill Wallsgrove
Human beings may not naturally be good at thinking about the future.
One thought is that, just like with charity appeals for current disasters, we should focus on an individual. Think ourselves into the shoes of some one as they experience the future.
It could be ourselves, a grandchild (if we have one), a ‘descendant’ – or anyone we can picture.
A startling powerful example of this appears in the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future, published in 2020. The author specialises in thoughtful, ‘realistic’ depictions of the future, for example in colonising Mars.
The Ministry for the Future starts by describing the experience of one Western man in a climate catastrophe, when twenty million people in northern India die in a heat wave. Many millions in a faraway country in the future: a newspaper headline. And ‘Frank May’, who works in a clinic near Lucknow, who nearly poaches to death in a lake full of people, where the water is above the temperature of blood.
I could not get the image of him out of my head for a lot longer than a headline.
I realised when watching the final episode of Planet Earth 3 last month that the image of Frank May was so vivid that it felt it was happening right now. It was not hypothetical, despite being fiction.
We may overdo the image of threats to a panda or polar bear or orangutan, to be invited to imagine a world without them. Just like we stop reacting to doe-eyed young children in charity ads. But I suspect we simply need this emotional connection.
Maybe like the Japanese traditionally put on the garment of a descendant, to feel how they will perceive the results of what we are doing now. We too could do this, to really feel it when we make a decision now about their infrastructure in fifty years’ time.
A technique to consider next time we are involved in long term asset decisions?
My colleague Todd Shepherd and I had a brainwave* last year to restructure how we teach Asset Management – not as a line that starts with investigating capital needs, the conventional beginning of the asset life cycle, but from where we are now. That is, right in the middle of maintenance. We are always deep in maintenance needs.
It makes more sense of the history of AM, straight off. It was not people writing business cases, or design engineers, who realised the urgent need for something different. It was maintenance, post World War 2, and then Penny Burns and the problem of unfunded replacements and renewals in the 1980s.
If Asset Management has waves, we might suggest what Wave Minus 1 was. Wave Minus 1 was hero engineers, from the Industrial Revolution on, building heroic infrastructure – Bazalgette and London sewers, Brooklyn Bridge. Sewers and bridges are both good things. But they are not quite such good things if they leak or fall down because they are not maintained or renewed.
With infrastructure, it is not enough to start; you have to see it through.
Penny used life cycle models to understand the extent of renewals, and increasingly I don’t feel anyone is really doing Asset Management if they do not use such models. Of course it is called life cycle for a reason. There isn’t an end, only another cycle.
But now I fear that starting at the beginning of one lifecycle in our teaching still makes it sound as though it is the creation of infrastructure that’s the important thing. We have not really got the cycle bit across enough, at least to the average engineer we teach. What comes after construction is still a vague future state, that is someone else’s problem.
And, not at all coincidentally, that’s also the point of the circular economy concept. There is no meaningful product end, and we are right in the middle of the mess we already built.
It is not a straight line into the future, where we set assets in motion and let them go. Longer term thinking, long-termism, has to think in cycles.
*Almost certainly it was Todd’s brainwave, which I managed to catch up with.
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