Steps in Preparing an Asset Management Plan

So the thing is I’m going to take you through – the next few slides are on “Steps in Preparing an AMP.”

And these steps are based on my experience over the last 20 years. And they come out with a paper that I produced at the IPWEA International Conference also the International Federation Municipal Engineers Conference.

And it was run by Australians so it will be like, I won the best paper, be like the Australian Cricket Team saying to New Zealand, “Well done!” It was just something I wasn’t expecting and I was quite happy about that.

Since then I have had a lot of feedback from colleagues in the industry that the next three slides you are going to see really do hit the mark quite nicely in terms of the process.

But the key thing to remind, and why I’ve got this spiral staircase, is that when I started in 1996, wrote an asset management plan, done, move on to the next thing. And it’s not like that.

What happens is the minute you do one, you’ll realize what you don’t know. And there’s an awful lot of assumptions, a lot of things you don’t know. And that assets aren’t static. They’re changing systems, they’re changing dynamics.

If its transportation – the ratio of large heavies or large trucks could be changing your distribution, your use of the roads can be changing, the damage, which is happening on the roads could be changing, all of those sorts of things.

Down where I live in the South Island we’ve had a lot of dairy conversion going on. So we’ve gone from dry stock we maybe had one truck every two weeks to two dairy tankers a day or five or ten going up the road.

So you’ll start getting a real big change in terms of the use and loading on the road. If you’re looking at the road – same with utilities and things like that.

So what happens is that you write the first one and then you go – oh there’s so much stuff that we don’t understand and so many assumptions.

So you get this iterative spiral of understanding as you learn more and understand more. The thing is that there are always trade-offs between demand and service levels and risk.

So there’s quite a lot of uncertainty in that as well so that you have to model. It is a process. It’s not a one hit.

This is what your first inclination might be when you first look at Asset Management Plans.

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Sections within Asset Management Plan