I am on the steering group reviewing the Institute of Asset Management (IAM) Competences Framework of 2014. I wrote this as input in December 2023.
I have three main areas of experience using the current IAM Competences Framework:
- I supported the original chair Chris Lloyd in proposing the knowledge areas for the IAM Diploma, loosely guided by the Competences framework
- Up to 2024 I carried out interviews for the Register of Asset Management Professionals, which uses the 7 role Competences model
- I have advised and taught extensively on the IAM framework, AM team competences, responsibilities and job definitions.
IAM Competences Framework model from v3.0 2014
The 7 role model here has always had a few issues.
For example, London Underground felt it was important to spell out that Role 4, ‘Implement Asset Management Plans’ is not of the same type as the other roles, since it includes all of the very wide range of lifecycle delivery roles and their equally wide-ranging requirements for qualifications, skills and knowledge, as well as employing many more people.
In teaching Asset Management, I find it difficult to justify Role 6, since we also teach that everyone involved in core Asset Management needs to understand and use Risk Management – and generally not rely on any specific Risk role. It’s not even clear what ‘Performance Improvement’ means as an AM role, again because everyone needs to be actively involved in continuous improvement. How, for example, does it relate to the responsibility for the AM System, and quality control & culture, both of which are obvious crucial?
Performance management is clearly a key area, possible too often underestimated in AM in practice, and not generally represented by specific roles. And this in my experience is also difficult to cover in the RoAMP interviews, which both in applicant responses and in interview questioning tend to focus on risk experience.
I think there’s a muddle in Role 6 that isn’t a reflection of how important risk and performance management are, but more about how they both relate to roles, as opposed to knowledge, techniques and tools.
The biggest issue in the RoAMP interviews – and one I have discussed with other ‘old hands’ such as Doug Marsh, Tim Gadd, Steve Bird and Rhys Davies – is Role 1, Policy Development. Developing the AM Policy is not a role; the AM Policy is a key AM system artefact, but not usually one that takes much time, and crucially isn’t really the ‘role’ of an Asset Manager at all, since it is above all a statement of commitment to AM principles from top management. An Asset Management team needs to facilitate it, but it is orders of magnitude less work than facilitating Asset Strategies and Asset Management Planning, which really are full-time jobs.
The compromise us old hand interviewers use is to have Role 1 include any liaison with top management, which surely is a key role for the AM team. (I think therefore it may include the top level strategy for Asset Management, or SAMP, as well as AM Policy, but this currently seems confused with the development of asset strategies, which I take to be Role 2.)
It has been pointed out already by others that the problem may be partly the confusion between all the asset-related tasks an asset-intensive organisation must include in its wider Asset Management System and specific core Asset Management roles. ‘Everyone as Asset Manager’ makes a good slogan, but a poor way to organise – bearing in mind as always David’s McKeown’s key article on the difference between managing assets and Asset Management, and the ISO/TC 251 statement based on it in 2017.*
I think we may have a consensus on the Steering Group that there is little point in repeating anything on lifecycle delivery competences, in engineering, project management, maintenance or operations, when these are all more than adequately already covered by their own specific competency frameworks. This is surely true for IT as well.
Knowledge v roles
I think there is another confusion between what a well-rounded Asset Management professional should know and job roles.
When we interview people for the RoAMP, we are asking what people have done, what they have active experience of, not primarily what they know and understand. But we are not simply asking what job titles they have had, and someone could easily have taken responsibility to something important that was not exactly in their job description. I don’t raise this here as a critique of the interviewing process, but to show that we recognise something in between knowledge (what you could learn on an IAM Certificate course, for example) and job titles.
I do not currently think the Certificate and Diploma syllabuses are perfect, and they suffer somewhat from the ‘managing assets versus Asset Management’ confusion, but at least it is clear what they are aiming for: the concepts you should understand to be a good all-round Asset Management professional (the Certificate), the tools and techniques you should be able to apply (the Diploma). That is where the IAM lays out what we should know. It is related to competences, but broader.
If we continue to use the concept of roles (which isn’t a given – other competences frameworks are not by role, e.g. CNAM), we probably need to stand back and ask, as Paul Gibbons suggested, what core Asset Management roles and responsibilities are required for modern Asset Management. Roles and responsibilities beyond what we have already in place, that are different but complementary to engineering, maintenance, operations, finance, HR.
These don’t necessarily have to be reflected exactly in specific job descriptions, certainly not job titles (one job may include several different responsibilities and ‘roles’ – and HR too often only allows a limited set of job titles to make it easier for them to classify grades and pay).
I am not sure if we have asked the question yet what responsibilities organisations currently recognise as specifically Asset Management; this may be worth getting the focus groups to look at, if we are crisp on the question.
However, I certainly have to advise organisations all the time on AM team roles in practice. It surely must relate to ‘deliverables’, or AM System artefacts, as Paul suggested. What does an AM team ‘do’?
Core AM Deliverables
I propose we therefore start by asking what core Asset Management delivers, in practice and theory.
In UK infrastructure, as well as in Australasia originally, there was no question that the real ‘deliverable’ was the integrated Asset Management Plan (as in the key requirement for regulated utilities here). ISO 55000 managed to confuse this somewhat by getting away from the primacy of one (or The) AMP. However, the importance of an integrated planning process as the basis for budgets, funding and price determination is fairly ubiquitous, for example in the US energy sector as ‘General Rale Case’ (or Canadian ‘General Rate Application’ or equivalent).
The alignment ‘backbone’ of PAS 55 points to planning, and this is more or less there in ISO 55000 too: how we get to a better overall plan of interventions on our assets, preferably longer than 5 years and preferably including all actions including maintenance budgeting and resourcing, not just capital expenditure. (And not just capital renewals, although there is a good reason that has been a vital AM responsibility – see Penny Burns’ The Story of Asset Management.)
ISO 55000 and the 6 Box Model then also make it clear that there are ‘enabling’ capabilities, that Asset Management also needs to deliver (on the basis that they have not up until now been delivered by anyone else): key among them asset risk framework, asset information strategy, change management and communication/ implementation of Asset Management itself.
And, although I think this was less obvious, at least to me, a decade ago, an emerging deliverable from a core AM team has been asset strategies, no longer something we expect lifecycle delivery functions to develop on their own, although they will provide the subject matter expertise. Asset Managers have to facilitate the strategies, the whole development of more strategic thinking on the assets. (This often starts with ‘asset class’ or ‘asset family’ strategies, but must also cover systems such as sites, networks, lines, routes. All of this was spotted by Scottish Water, Southern Water and others in the early days of PAS 55.)
In practice, many organisations I work with and teach organise around the roles of AM lead, AM Planning, Asset Information, Asset Strategies, and a few of the bigger teams have explicit Asset Risk roles (for example, Manitoba Hydro).
Many recognise they should have explicit AM Change Management & Communications roles, too, but this remains a personal and organisational challenge for many. If an AM team is basically made up of enlightened ex engineers or ex maintenance (ex, in that they are therefore no longer doing engineering or maintenance delivery roles), risk and change management are likely to be significant missing skills from their previous experiences and training They are also more challenging to implement in roles, because the AM teams are less sure of what they need to do. And they of course overlap not with engineering but corporate risk and corporate change management – who may resist them at least as robustly as engineering can resist the more technical asset strategy and planning roles.
Note that in practice I see an emerging distinction that I think may be crucial, between asset information responsibilities (hopefully not including data entry or IT implementation) and data analysis; they do not often go together, in that someone can be fine on asset data without having data analysis skills or interest, and a valuable data analyst should not be pulled into asset data management.
How to build on existing Competences model
Chis Lloyd and the original Competences group were very smart, of course. This ‘deliverable’ based idea of roles is more or less there in the original 7 roles. I believe it just needs to be cleaned up a little, plus an explicit ‘link’ to capabilities that we certainly must have in our organisations but don’t need to cover in IAM Competences in any detail because they are covered elsewhere.
Core Roles & Responsibilities
These more or less map on to what we already have:
- Asset Strategies
- Asset Management Planning
- Asset Management Change Management
- Asset Risk Framework
- Asset Information Strategy
I would argue that the AM Policy and SAMP (as in top level strategy for Asset Management itself) go together, especially if they are bundled with responsibility for liaison with top management, which is a huge part of a successful AM team lead’s day to day work in practice.
Link out to other competences
- Lifecycle Delivery
- IT
Some remaining questions
- How do we bring out data analysis, which really is a core AM responsibility crucial to AM planning and asset strategies, as well as underpinning a sound asset information strategy?
- ‘Digital’ probably isn’t a role, but we may feel it is an essential knowledge area/s for an Asset Manager going forward. (Not only am I not the expert here, but I am sceptical it is one ‘thing’ at all.)
- ‘Sustainability’ is another area of key knowledge going forward: perhaps we might propose a role area that is certainly important going forward and (crucially) not already done by another function or profession, which is longer-term asset planning. It has to be said that the idea of AM planning has shrunk from its original conception by Penny Burns, who took it as given you need to plan 10+ years out on the asset base, include all your asset interventions, and for many years now also that it includes sustainability.
Other concerns
AM has always been plagued – if that is not too strong a word – by the need to show we care. That we are aware there are other things that need doing, even if we are not responsible for them. (I know that most existing and well-embedded disciplines don’t feel such a need to do this.)
For example, if our organisations say safety is the most important issue, then we have to include safety in our AM Policy, even if it is not our primary responsibility as Asset Managers. (And is simply a repeat of what is already stated in our top level organisational goals.)
Asset Management only works if there are competent lifecycle delivery functions and processes in place, so we get confused about whether they are also Asset Managers.
And we do care about sustainability, but this still needs to be expressed in a practical way – in what way do we want to take responsibility for sustainability? I am quite happy for us to take this on, but only if we really know what we are doing and invest in the skills to do it.
In supporting AM teams, being clear about what they should not be responsible for – what they do not do, because it is the responsibility of another function, for example capturing maintenance data – is also important, but probably beyond our remit here. It may however be useful to have an internal definition of what is and is not in scope for AM responsibilities.
REW, December 2023.
*From ISO/ TC 251 2017, Managing Assets in the Context of Asset Management
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