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 many of them challenging teams 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?