Ethics and Thought Process in Infrastructure Asset Management

Ross shared the ethical practice that must be observed in doing one’s infrastructure asset management plan.

Heather explained the thought process that would-be infrastructure management practitioners must adopt.

Ross:

We’ve had a situation in New Zealand where consultants had written a whole plan, not my team, but some other ones and they’ve not been as ethical as they needed to be in that and loaded a whole lot of projects in for themselves as well.

I’m sure that never happens in the US (Heather: No, never.) but that’s something to watch out for as well you know when you’re doing your own asset plan, you can just keep a fairly tight rein on any temptation for that sort of behavior.

Heather:

And the other thing to look out for is asset management is a thought process. And the thought process goes through the current state of the assets, what you have, where is it. Those kinds of basic questions.

Then the levels of service, which is what you want it to do. Then criticality where you’re looking at which assets are critical to your sustained performance and which ones will have the probabilities of failure and the consequence of failure?

And then you’ll go to life cycle costing, which gets into how you’re going to operate, maintain, repair and replace your assets. And then finally you’ll move on to funding. How are you going to fund this?

So also beware that an asset management program that doesn’t involve all those five elements is not an asset management program. It’s a piece of one.

So you could do a piece of one if you would like to, but be aware that you will get less benefit out of the program if you don’t do the whole thing. So just another caution if you’re going to contract out for some of this.

If somebody comes back with just an asset inventory as their whole activity, that’s fine you’re getting an asset inventory but you’re not getting asset management.

So just kind of keep aware that if they’re not all five of those components, you’re not getting an asset management program or a full asset management plan, you’re just getting a component.

And while a component can help you, it won’t give you all the benefits of truly thinking in an asset management way.

So again, just be careful about the two differences there, you know the asset management pieces versus an asset management program and the full infrastructure asset management thinking that goes on.

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PHOTO CREDIT: Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington DC by Axel Drainville via Flickr Creative Commons License