Ross:
And Heather, I met the gentleman at Albuquerque who wrote that and the thing that impressed me was he was a private individual. He was just helping out.
He’s I think a voluntary custodian for his community of the water system. And if he wasn’t 75, he was that sort that age if not a bit older and I was just really impressed with him.
Here he was applying his life experience to help his community this nice little simple asset plan. And he wasn’t an engineering professional or anything like that.
And I think the thing that really helped him he was using your asset management from Kansas manual and he had been to a seminar or two. That is just a really good resource for the small community and that’s on your website, isn’t it?
Heather:
Yes, it was kind of interesting because he had actually come to a training session that we had done one time in Albuquerque. And he was very, very interested and he actually used it, as his goal was to work his way off the Board.
He’d been a board member of this particular water system for quite a while and his idea was if I can get this system in better shape I can retire and somebody else can take over.
So his goal was, he saw it as a way to really make the system better and leave it in better hands and maybe somebody might want to be a board member because it was better ran and had better information.
And then he came back a year later for similar training and the first thing I said to him was, “Oh I see that you’re back. I just want to let you know that it’s going to be a very similar course then you’re welcome to stay but just know that it’s just a repeat.”
And he says, “Oh, no, no the reason I’m here is to share with you that I’ve done my plan.”
So he literally spent the year using our AM KAN WORK manual that we gave him at the training.
He used it as a way to sort of walk himself through the process and then he had come back to kind of show what he had done. And then he’d asked some suggestions of how to continue the process.
His case just showed me that somebody who’s not a water professional but just had spent a lot of time as a board member for this particular system really was able to think through the process, cut it down to really what was important to them, in a very short amount of time and amount of pages to fit the level that was comfortable for their system.
We don’t need to have super high-level sophistication.
We just need the infrastructure asset management thought process to be there we just need the thinking part to be there, thinking about:
- what assets you have,
- what you want them to do,
- which ones are critical,
- how you’re going to maintain for their life cycle and then
- how you going to pay for it.
Those five basic components need be in there but there’s lots of room to tailor the sophistication level, up or down depending on a system so it can be done at the very small level.
Ross:
It’s start simple, isn’t it? That’s the key.
Like lots of little steps in doing water utility asset management and that to me though too, that’s a touching and inspiring story.
And there are people like that in communities right across the world, particularly across the US, who are putting their time into making their communities a better place. And for all the negativity that’s happening in the world that’s a good news story. I like hearing them.
PHOTO CREDIT: “Albuquerque BalloonFiesta” by Eric Ward from Provo, UT, USA – http://www.flickr.com/photos/94833286@N00/279059564/. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons. The photo was scaled down to fit the website’s requirement.
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