The dTIMS Agency Roadmap: Introduction — dTIMS® | Infrastructure Asset Management Software

Gary Ruck is a registered Professional Engineer and Project Management Professional in Ontario. He has over 37 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

This is Part IV of a seven-part blog series on the dTIMS Agency Roadmap. Please refer to the introductory blog “Part I - An Agency Roadmap – Do I Need One of Those?” for the basis of this series.

In this instalment, we will introduce the dTIMS Agency Roadmap specifically how it relates to asset management; and, more importantly, how you can start to look at where your agency is with respect to its asset management practices and how you could start to improve upon them.

Introduction

We ended the previous blog with a quote that I will repeat here:

“All you need is the plan, the road map, and the courage to press on to your destination.”

— Earl Nightingale

There are four noteworthy concepts mentioned in this quote: a plan, a roadmap, courage, and a destination. But perhaps the biggest item is “You”. As in You the asset owner/steward/manager of your agency’s asset or asset portfolio. You should be aware that a roadmap is how you get from Point A to Point B, and in this case that is a place of lower asset management maturity towards a place of higher asset management maturity.

My hope is that these blogs as well as the experts at Deighton, can help you harness the desire for improvement and instil in you the courage to proceed.

“It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop”

— Confucius

I think this nicely encapsulates the “press on” part of the previous observation. The remainder of this blog will introduce the concepts of plan, roadmap, and destination. Later blogs will delve into these in more detail.

What is a Roadmap?

There are many acceptable definitions of this, but for the purpose of this blog, we will consider this:

A roadmap is a strategic plan that defines a goal or desired outcome and includes the major steps or milestones needed to reach it.
It also serves 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 can also be a benchmark to gauge progression.

Every roadmap, be it for a family vacation or for an asset management journey contains the following attributes:

A starting point
A route made of interconnected paths (there may be many of these, but ultimately you would settle upon one)
Waypoints
A timeframe
A destination

Just this past summer, my vacation took me from my home city to the United Kingdom. We spent 3 weeks travelling from London through England, Wales, and Scotland. There were many places we had picked to stop at, and that ultimately created the route we would take. If any of those attributes had changed, the route would likely have been very different.

How do these attributes relate to an asset management (AM) roadmap? Let’s explore further. But before we begin, each roadmap should have a guiding principle, a North Star if you will, that helps underpin the creation of the roadmap. For the vacation, it was seeing some famous UK landmarks but also to explore off the beaten path.

In the case of the AM roadmap, it can be to improve your agency’s AM maturity. That is, to ensure as time goes on, your agency is doing more or a better job in AM this year compared to last year. So, with this as the North Star for the AM roadmap, let’s explore those attributes.

Starting Point

The origin of the roadmap is your agency’s current asset management practices. This can encompass the assets included, data sources and governance, stakeholders (both internal and external to the agency), purpose, and strategy, to just name a few. Blog 2 explored six fundamental questions around asset management that will help establish this starting point.

Route

This is the path you will take from beginning to end. It sounds simple, but it isn’t. What is the end? Even using Google Maps with one origin and one destination that you can clearly define will often come up with several alternate routes. What if neither of these can be unequivocally defined. The route ends up being a myriad of paths, but in the end, it often does not matter because if the North Star is in place and you follow the guiding principle, you will be on the roadmap and the specific route is secondary. The concept of route will be discussed further in later blogs.

Waypoints

A waypoint is a fixed location that the route must pass through and in some cases at a specific point in time. That is, we must be in Edinburgh on August 1st. Whatever route you take both prior to and after that, doesn’t really matter if you are at the waypoint at the desired time. The waypoints must be laid out with your North Star as the guide, as they will help focus your route from a potentially endless number of paths to a select few. A waypoint is a milestone or a stage gate along the way. They’re critical because by checking off waypoints, you know you’re still following the roadmap.

In terms of an AM roadmap, they could be established by legislation. For example, the agency must have a risk-based pavement management system by Fall 2024 and a risk-based bridge management system by Fall 2025.

Timeframe

The timeframe establishes the allotted time you have to go from starting point to destination. In some cases, this is going to be on-going. In others, you will have a finite amount of time especially in cases where the roadmap is driven by legislation. Such as, we need an AM plan in place for the Federal reporting deadline of Spring 2026. Depending on the timeframe, your route or even possibly your destination may be impacted. You may have to break the journey into several trips rather than just one.

Destination

The destination may seem like the easiest attribute to define and yet it might be the most difficult. How do you know if you have arrived? With a vacation, it is pretty evident but with an AM roadmap, you may not be able to definitively define this, or it may change after you have defined it.

This last thought leads to two further points. The route must be flexible enough to absorb changes and there must be enough alternate paths to take. For example, what if construction has closed the route you intended to take. In AM, the same thing applies if legislative dates change which could happen with a change in government policy.

The second point is that perhaps rather than having a fixed destination in mind, continuous improvement might be your “destination”. That is, rather than saying we must get to a specific end goal by such and such a date, your roadmap strategy should allow you to progressively improve your destination.

Conclusion

The dTIMS Agency Roadmap is built upon the framework presented here. The idea of this roadmap is not unlike any other roadmap – to help you get from your current location to your destination and hopefully avoid any pitfalls along the way and of course to enjoy the journey!

At Deighton, the Agency Roadmap begins with a System Audit or Assessment. This consists of three distinct levels beginning with an efficiency review, before moving on to a best practice review, and finally concluding with the building out of a roadmap. Along the way, an asset management maturity score is derived simply to be able to quantify an agency’s asset management position at any point in time. This allows you to be able to review this score at different times and compare.

This blog introduced the various attributes of a roadmap in the light of asset management. These attributes and the dTIMS Asset Management Maturity Score will be explored in detail in the next blog.

If you are responsible for asset management in your agency, please review these roadmaps and the accompanying material in this blog to understand the items you will require for your journey. Pack your bags, set your course, and enjoy the ride!

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.

Up Next: Part V - The dTIMS Roadmap: Getting a Score, How do You Measure Up?