As a public works engineering consultant for 28 years, MorrisonLow director Tim McCarthy has expertise in asset management, project delivery processes, maintenance operations and contract management. He shares his thoughts on why service delivery and effective planning are the keys to asset management in local government.
What are the challenges that public works asset managers have to deal with on a regular basis?
Local councils are large diverse businesses that provide an important range of services to their communities. They have to manage and maintain roads, sewerage, bridges, sporting facilities, libraries and so on. They are often faced with the issue of limited funds and resources combined with high community expectations.
As a consultant, what is your basic approach to asset management?
Our view at MorrisonLow is that you have to focus on what is sustainable and what is implementable. We like to sit down with our clients, talk through their assets in relation to the services they have to deliver to their communities and come up with something that is sustainable.
I recently worked with a NSW mid north coast council who were clearly spending too much money on being reactive. That is, they were waiting for problems to occur and then patching them rather than taking a longer term view of the management of their assets. This approach led them to lose track of their funds and the big picture of service delivery. I encouraged them to stand back, and have a look at their overall asset network and how it can be managed.
You have to find the best value approach. For example, rather than patch potholes in roads or rebuild a failed road, it is often better management to have a road resurfacing program in place.
How does the political cycle impact upon asset management?
You know, since the implantation of the integrated planning reforms three or four years ago, I think the political cycle is beginning to have less of an impact and as it becomes more embedded it will be even less so. The whole new structure of long term planning including community strategic plans, long term financial plans, work force plans and of course asset management plans, now mean that councils are able to make informed planning decisions for new and ongoing projects. If for example, a council is planning to build a new public swimming pool the plans will be in place to be able to properly assess the impact it will have at every level of the budgetary process, on staff and on other asset management priorities.
However there is a lot more to do. The integrated planning reforms forced councils to develop plans, but many of these are still at just a compliance level. They need to be improved to be at a level where they extract the total value from the assets demanded by the community.
Can asset management as a profession be improved - how?
I think that there needs to be a change of thinking about what the purpose of assets is. Asset managers need to start from the premise that the delivery of services is the driving force behind asset management, not just the maintenance of those assets.
How long do you think it will be before best practice in asset management is adopted across the whole local government sector?
Every council is different. Some are large, some are small, some rural, some are urban and they all have different cultures, different sized budgets and most importantly different expectations by their communities of the delivery of services. So I think how long it takes depends upon the council to some extent.
Asset management is a continuous improvement process, which should be updated regularly. I think that on or about the third cycle of the integrated planning reforms, or in 10 to 12 years, councils will begin to develop really good and effective long term plans. By then the hard work will have been done.
You see, most local councils initially set out just to achieve compliance with the legislation. Then the effectiveness of plans are tested against the day-to-day running of assets and then there is the community input into to how services are being delivered. This all leads to a greater appreciation of the effectiveness of long term planning for assets. It is the second and third phase of the asset management planning where the significant benefits will be achieved.
In response to these challenges the asset manager must ask how this actually helps to deliver services and to manage assets. So the process of developing effective asset management takes time, but has been helped greatly by the implementation of the strategic planning reforms.