Our communities have delegated the management of physical infrastructure assets to us – including the worrying about the systems, the future, and change.
A key AM principle is not to kick the can down the road. For example, if you can see you will have a shortage of resources to manage the assets in ten years’ time, you have to start to deal with that now. (It will take you ten years to sort out.)
In the world of physical assets, things generally only get worse when you ignore them.
Assets degrade, and what is a small risk one day becomes a bigger risk simply through time. A failing asset that you don’t deal with becomes a more seriously failing asset.
However, human beings in general are not very good about time.
- We focus more on present benefits than future benefits
- We are not naturally good at understanding risks
- We are poor at noticing and paying attention to anything that changes relatively slowly, as opposed to immediate crises.
Generally, the people in the communities we serve won’t always have a great understanding about physical assets anyway, and are not good at thinking ahead for their future.
Communities need to be able to delegate the responsibilities to people who are good at it: who specialize not only at the engineering and maintenance of physical systems, but at managing through time, for the future as well as today.
We need to tool ourselves up, flex our through-time mental muscles. What will the decisions we make now look like to ‘future us’?
We will not always get it right, but with physical infrastructure we need to be the ones who can start to think about risk and benefits in four dimensions.
It is not obvious who else is ever going to do this!
What tools have you successfully used to manage the future?
Summarised from Legacy, our latest publication
I woke up with a start last week thinking: good Asset Management is all about time.
We tend to think of managing physical assets being about space – things, in systems and networks, on sites. But this is what we inherit from Engineering. Engineers manage space, things in space. But we do not train them to consider the fourth dimension: what these things in space will look like, or deliver, in ten, or fifty, or a hundred years’ time.
I mean, it is hard enough to design a functioning system: to think beyond individual assets or components, to how they all work together. Our engineering training is not always that successful in getting us to think in systems, and how the whole adds up to something other than all the pieces: to deliver the services our organisations and our communities require. We still have some way to go to this ‘alignment’ from assets to output, let alone outcome. And system interactions can be difficult, especially if they cross discipline and silo boundaries.
But, unfortunately, we have to go even beyond this.
Lou Cripps of RTD Denver describes a good Asset Management practitioner as a time traveller. Managing for the future, based on where we are now, and informed by historical experiences and data. With physical systems, we always have to start where we are now, to be grounded in the physical realities, not floating free in blue skies. And we need the historical experience to be able to project forward, through modelling in its widest sense.
The first engineering manager I worked for described smart engineers as wanting to make leaps unfettered by whatever mess we were currently in. “With one bound, he was free!’ (This also reminds me of some strategic planners I have met…)
A good Asset Manager, I suspect, may be no less ambitious, but focused on something else: the challenge of working from where we are now, whatever that may be, to a sustainable infrastructure future. Not pinning too much hope on magic to come that might change the basic physical realities, or people, but thinking how the next step could lead to the step after that, how one consequence can lead to another, thinking about time and through time.
What kind of tools do we need to assist us in this?
What kind of education do we need for our Asset Managers of the future?
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