Gary Ruck is a registered Professional Engineer and Project Management Professional in Ontario. He has over 35 years of experience in asset management and is a recognized expert in that field. He is currently the Director of Global Business Development at Deighton Associates Ltd.
Summary
Many organizations that have implemented some form of an asset management system often wonder what’s next? Is my system up-to-date and providing me the best return on investment? What new innovations are out there that I could benefit from? What are other agencies doing, and am I following best practices? Read on and this blog will help you with these questions.
Introduction
Imagine you bought a starter house and you start wondering how you can potentially upgrade it over time. Or you've lived in your current house for several years and are ready to make some upgrades to it. In both scenarios, there are many things you can do. You can do regular maintenance on it to keep it functional, or you can upgrade existing rooms with paint, new furniture and other amenities. You could do more substantive changes like add additional space, upgrade existing systems or other major renovations. How would you know what to do, where to start, what it would cost and if it’s worth it in the long run?
Most homeowners would create a plan, research what can be done, come up with estimates and a timeline, and start to plan out the work either formally or informally. This is like a renovation road map.
An agency that has implemented a single asset management system is in a similar position as the homeowner. If the agency is fortunate enough to have an asset management software application that is capable of expansion, then they are also able to evaluate whether they are getting the best return on their investment in the software, and if not, change it. But often, the challenge is where and how to start and what to do next.
Agency Roadmaps
“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.
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A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps needed to reach it. It can also serve as a communication tool, a high-level document that helps articulate strategic thinking—the why—behind both the goal and the plan for getting there. It would be used as a benchmark to gauge progression. Any roadmap not only shows you the destination but also the stops along the way, the preferred route (often among many alternatives sometimes) and your current progress towards the destination.
Any agency that uses dTIMS as their asset management application can plan their asset management journey and look at opportunities to change or enhance that journey.
“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.”
With a roadmap - at least the modern kind that uses GPS, not the paper version - you can gauge your progress along the route at any point in time (think of the little blue dot!). An agency progressing along its roadmap needs some measure to quantitatively gauge itself at any point in time. This is called the Asset Management Maturity (AMM) scale and it can be used to pinpoint where you are today and see if you have progressed when measured again at a future date. It is not an absolute or universal measure, but if used consistently for an organization over time, it does not need to be. The reason the AMM is so important is to know that if you change something with your asset management system (AMS), did you make things better?
And speaking of changing something in your AMS, how would you go about doing this? At Deighton, we talk about growth in three ways: organically, vertically, and horizontally. In this blog we will introduce the concept and then dive into further details in subsequent blog posts. The following table outlines the types of growth and the common activities performed for each of the growth types.
Conclusion
Asset management in an organization is not an inexpensive undertaking. Between data collection, storage and maintenance of data, staff time to support all the asset management activities and computer software applications – the purchase, configuration, and maintenance of these resources can add up! However, to not do asset management is even more costly and much riskier. The worst thing would be to sink all these costs into asset management and then not get the benefit out of it and/or let the system stagnate and not advance to accommodate the ever present and ongoing changes in the industry, therefore not providing the value to your organization that asset management should.
Fortunately, with Deighton’s assistance and dTIMS as the tool, you can grow your asset management system to ensure your organization maximizes its return on investment. Deighton has begun the development of an agency roadmap and is currently seeking agencies to help fine tune it.
Using the graphic below, where is your agency? Are you able to answer this question? What information do you need to be able to? What is your agency’s Asset Management Maturity? Do you know how to increase it?
I am guessing most readers may not be able to answer all these questions or if you can, will at least want to be able to maximize their return on their asset management investment. If this is your agency, then the next step is yours to take. I encourage you to reach out to myself or anyone else at Deighton to learn more about the agency roadmap and to participate in and help influence the work Deighton is doing in this area.
To learn more, stay tuned for the next blog in this series: “The Checklist – What questions you can ask to help build a roadmap”.
Asset Management Roadmap Blog Series:
Part 1: An Agency Roadmap - Do I Need One of Those?
Part 2: The Checklist – What Questions You Can Ask to Help Build a Roadmap