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 V 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 installment, we will introduce the dTIMS Asset Management Maturity (AMM) score, and specifically how it relates to asset management. More importantly, we will discuss how you can apply the concepts from the roadmap introduced in the previous blog to quantify your current maturity level and explore ways to increase it.
Introduction
We ended the previous blog with a definition of a roadmap that I will repeat here:
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 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.
The previous blog identified the components related to the first bullet above. The remainder of this blog will focus more on the last bullet.
To gauge progression, you need a starting point to compare your progress against. You can only really improve what you can measure. The starting point is your benchmark, and your progression will be compared against that.
The dTIMS Asset Management Maturity Score
When evaluating a current dTIMS setup during a System Assessment, Deighton Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) will perform a dTIMS maturity assessment to establish a baseline dTIMS Asset Management Maturity (AMM) score. This score will be per asset class and then summarized for all asset classes in the cases where multiple asset classes are managed within dTIMS BA. It is important to point out that this score is not a universal, certified score or based on any standard. Rather, it is influenced by the “Guide for using the Asset Management BC Roadmap (May 2011)”. The score is primarily used to compare the dTIMS maturity level at a point in time against the established benchmark.
Categories
In the Guide referenced earlier and in the evaluation, there are six basic categories used, and these are:
Know Your Assets
Know Your Financial Situation
Understand Decision-making
Manage Your Asset Lifecycle
Know the Rules
Sustainability Monitoring
Within each of these categories, subcategories have been identified for modules that typically would make up a basic, intermediate, or advanced asset management system. The categories and subcategories used for the dTIMS AMM are shown below:
A table of the categories and subcategories used for the dTIMS AMM.
Finally, the sub-categories are broken down even further into more specific dTIMS items. These are actions or features that could or should exist in an asset management system.
Scoring
Presently, the scoring works as follows:
Each item has a unique number.
For example, “Condition” data is Item “VG1.5”, meaning this is Vertical Growth (VG) sub-category 1 (Basic Asset Inventory) and Item 5 (Condition).
Each item has a Scoring value. This allows each item to be weighted the same throughout, or alternatively, some items could be given more importance if required.
Each Asset class has a column in the scoring spreadsheet, and this allows for Horizontal Growth (HG) across the asset portfolio.
For example, Pavements is HG1, and Structures is HG2, etc.
For each item AND each asset, the item is scored with one of three possible values:
Y – For this agency and asset class, the item is currently being utilized in dTIMS BA.
N – For this agency and asset class, the item is currently NOT being utilized in dTIMS BA
N/A – For this agency and asset class, the item is currently Not Applicable
For each sub-category, the item scores are summed to derive a sub-category score, and then this is multiplied by the weighting score of the sub-category for the overall sub-category score.
All sub-category scores are summed to derive the overall score for the asset.
Finally, for all assets that are being evaluated, the asset scores are summed to derive the overall dTIMS AMM score. It is represented as a percentage out of 100.
The dTIMS AMM score is a relative value at a point in time of an agency’s dTIMS asset maturity journey. It provides a baseline to measure against for future evaluations after the implementation of asset management best practices.
Much like when you visit your doctor for your annual physical. The doctor will measure your blood pressure, among other vitals, and if it or other vitals are not satisfactory, the doctor will recommend improvement changes to your diet and/or lifestyle. Then, when you go back the following year and get the same vitals measured, these will be compared against previous readings to see if there was an improvement in your overall health.
Conclusion
The dTIMS Asset Management Maturity score is a concept that can be used to improve your asset management system within dTIMS. By adding new innovations and/or new asset classes, you are expanding the capabilities of dTIMS and bringing additional value to your organization.
The byproduct of deriving this score is your dTIMS multi-year roadmap. The roadmap contains the activities identified during the Assessment to improve your agency’s dTIMS maturity level. The score is analogous to your current blood pressure reading, and the roadmap is the doctor’s recommendations on how to improve your overall health. Both are critical components to improving your overall dTIMS health.
This blog introduced the dTIMS Asset Management Maturity score and its attributes, as well as a conceptual calculation method. In the next blog instalment, we will look at the three levels of asset management.
If you are responsible for asset management in your agency, please review the roadmap and the maturity score concepts in this blog and the previous one to understand the items you will require for your journey. And remember, you can only improve that which you can measure.
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 VI - The dTIMS Roadmap: Strategic, Operational, Tactical Oh My!
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
Part 3: A Look at Two Roadmaps – IAM and AMBC
Part 4: The dTIMS Agency Roadmap: Introduction
Part 5: The dTIMS Agency Roadmap: Getting a Score. How do you Measure Up?