So I thought I would start by just talking about what are they (Asset Management Plans). And essentially they’ve developed over the last 20 years as a structured methodology for presenting information about infrastructure assets and their management.
As I said, in 1996 we started them in New Zealand. The Australian’s started a little bit early than us. Maybe the earliest ones they did start in the early 1990s.
And they developed from that. And so, they are lined up in New Zealand with the political cycle. So, every three years we have the requirement to update them.
It was interesting, the North American’s when I was talking to them – they said: “Why three years? That seems a bizarrely short period of time.”
“Oh, because our political cycle is three years I said”.
“Oh, so we should do them every four years…Yes.”
And the British do them every five years because their political cycle is a five-year political cycle.
So, the reality is the interval between updating is often dictated by an in-country political cycle.
Even in, like for example communist China, in reality, they don’t have changes in the government so they still have the People’s Congress every five years. In a country like that, you would still line it up with political events essentially.
They have evolved over the last 20 years since they were started and we’ve tried stuff. We’ve tried ways of doing things that have and haven’t worked well.
So, what I’m presenting now is the evolution of 20 years of practice development as the best way of presenting the information.
Now there’s a heap of resources available. These are….everything off our shelves for a photo for a conference a year ago and so I took a photo.
So, one of the key resources is this thing here. I don’t know if you’ve come across this, which is the International Infrastructure Management Manual that’s co-produced out of New Zealand and Australia.
It has a section on it for the US, Canada, UK, and South Africa and it’s updated about every four years; four five- year update cycles.
So this is the fourth edition I think. The first one is in ’96. There was another one in the early 2000s and a mid-2006, one in 2011 and this one is 2015.
And that should be available somewhere around the campus if you want to have a look at it. It’s certainly available… I think Theuns said it’s in the library or something like that.
So that’s a toolkit on how to do things. I’m a section author of two sections in it. One of my colleagues who I work with is a section author of another one. So we’ve authored three sub-sections there.
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