So if we know that for sports, and we also know from the practice of infrastructure management that consistent investment also wins, why do we think we can do this, which is shown in this graph where we’ve got optimized would be spending something every year and keep the system moving forward and be able to make corrections and learn and introduce new techniques as we go along.
Optimized those techniques, and drive the overall investment program forward, and maintain good roads or good utilities and just deliver consistently good service.
We know that – that’s the right answer.
Why do we think we can spend nothing for decades and then suddenly, in a very short period, we’ll invest a whole lot of money and get it back to where it should be?
And when you look at that logically, and particularly in terms of the sports analogy, it just doesn’t work. Not only is your levels of service are going down and you’re going to introduce a whole lot of the risk.
But when you do try to do that big investment, who’s going to build it? Who’s going to supervise it?
Who’s going to project manage it? Who’s going to design it? And who’s going to fund it?
And then you’d be creating an artificial peak.
So, you’ll be paying top dollar for it as well and you’ll lose your opportunity to optimize both your techniques and also as you go along, and you lose your ability to adjust as you go along.
And so, our requirement is pretty simple. Consistent investment wins.
Consistent scoring wins. And that’s the message we can take back to our decision-makers.
Conclusion
So in conclusion, just some thoughts to take away. We’ve got to deal with societal myths. And that is an issue for infrastructure management practitioners and there is a 20-year lag.
So the myth has built up over the last decade and Western society is going to be dealing with this for the next 20 years.
Levels of service need to be modeled across the range from least provision to the highly specialist assets with different drivers for those.
There is that risk-cost-level of service trade-off and how to model that and how to communicate that?
And risk factors of safety need to be, we need to sort those out around the safety of our systems and maintaining trust.
When we lost trust, it’s a long long way and a long long time to come back from it.
And we need to communicate and perhaps using the sports analogy is one of those ways of doing that—the advantages of consistent investment at the right level at the right time.
Thank you very much.
Winning the Infrastructure Management ‘Game’ – Lessons from the Rugby World Cup, Superbowl, and NBA
[…] worthwhile spending the time communicating and building wide consensus in communities about the infrastructure asset management action that’s needed even though it takes a lot of time and […]