After 25 years working in the private sector and for a publicly listed company, Reece Harrison joined the City of Charles Sturt, South Australia, as Asset Management Coordinator about two years ago. Harrison presented at the 2013 IPWEA Public Works Conference in Darwin on the experience of implementing a new asset management system over that period, and says the past two years have provided a whole new perspective on the complexity of local government.
How did you originally come to be working in local government, and what drew you to asset management in particular?
It turns out it was a series of fortunate events, although at the time it didn’t seem so. I’d been in a completely unrelated field of event production and management for 25-odd years, when the organisation I was with at the time went through a restructure and I was unfortunately part of a group of people that had to move on.
It had been a long time since I’d thought about employment, and I ended up with a very short-term contract here at the City of Charles Sturt as a business analyst in their IT area, working on a project to implement a works and assets system for the Asset Management team.
Through a bunch of changes in that space, this role – Coordinator of Asset Management – came up, and someone suggested I should have a look at it, because it was connected to the project we were working on at the time. So I put my hand up, and… low and behold!
I’ve only been in local government just a little over two years now, if I include the contract period, so it’s actually a very new space for me. I’ve managed assets before, but they were very different assets.
How have you found working in local government compared to your previous role?
Many people can be quite critical of local government based on hearsay and anecdotal conversations at barbecues, but I’m definitely a ‘convert’ now, in that I defend what local government employees have to do and have to put up with from a tiers of government perspective. Having to work with all of that and the general public and the rate payers – it's actually a really complex machine, and I certainly have a far greater appreciation of that process now.
So it’s been a real learning curve, which I’ve actually found to be a benefit. As a new person coming in, I’ve just asked lots of questions and made those people who have been working in the space for some time just sit down and step through what they do and discuss the good things and the bad things, which gives us the opportunity to reflect on that and look for opportunities to improve.
For me, the document is a celebration of the hard work and success we’ve had in making small incremental improvements over time as we prepare to go through quite a significant change in asset management services here at Charles Sturt.
Presenting at the Conference was an opportunity to reflect on the journey that not just myself but everyone here has been through from basically June 2011 when I came on as a contractor, and that includes a move to mobility devices in the field, with electronic work orders and a focus on reducing paper and ultimately making it easier to communicate information from what our field services team is working on right through to the back of house.
It actually wasn’t until I thought through of all of this for the paper abstract that I realised this is kaizen – that is, small positive changes and tweaks over a period of time that ultimately gives you a greater outcome. The notion comes from the Japanese-Kanji word for ‘good change’ and has been around for some, but Toyota probably gets the credit for popularising it.
What prompted an overhaul of Asset Management systems at your council?
There was quite a complex piece of strategy work done back in 2004, well before my time here, and out of that things were identified that needed to occur, including establishing an IT system to underpin asset management – because certainly back then, the councils that were succeeding in that space had electronic systems to assist them.
However, one thing that we always try and point out is that there’s this human tendency to pin hopes and dreams on an electronic system to save the day, but we’ve always been quite clear here that it’s just part of the process and it still won’t replace people willing to think strategically or outside the square.
How did you find the Darwin Conference, and was there a highlight?
I’d literally only just paid up my IPWEA membership before the conference. I’d been following the Ask Your Mates forums and just sort of floating around and watching but not necessarily engaging. I found those really useful, so I formalised my personal membership.
It was my first IPWEA conference, and my first time in Darwin – the last of Australia’s capital cities to tick on my bucket list. I’ll be honest with you, I hate humidity, but I really enjoyed the conference. Certainly the general consensus among those I’ve spoken to who have been to a few other IPWEA conferences, was that it was one of the best overall.
I really enjoyed the session layouts. I felt a little rushed maybe – there was something like 130 different papers and topics to choose from, and I was actually sad that I couldn’t attend all the ones I wanted to get to! But I really enjoyed it, and the opportunity to just talk to others about what they’re up to, exchange ideas, exchange contact details. I’ve had some really good follow up conversations since then, too.
Are there any particular challenges you’re currently facing in your work?
One of the main the challenges I have working as an Asset Management Coordinator is coordinating people who might be managers of particular assets, but they’re also project managers and they’re dealing with the public on matters of maintenance requests and requests for new things. Those people are often torn between the day-to-day reality of a person on the phone who wants something, an elected member who wants something, a report due, a project running – and then there’s Reece Harrison here poking around saying “hey don’t forget we have this asset management plan, or we want to do this long-term financial plan,” – all the things that aren’t at the forefront of their mind.
So the challenge for me is to balance it out, and linking back to that kaizen approach, it really for me is trying to breakdown what seems like a very complex process into small, manageable chunks, so they’re not every six months having to come in and do a whole series of reports and so forth –they can just do them over time.
What is the most rewarding part of your work at the City of Charles Sturt?
A lot of it is for me is having had the realisation that local government is far more complex than perhaps the general member of the public would anticipate.
Also, coming in with the experiences I’ve had and being able to apply those in my own team in asset management, helping them to grow and find different ways and different skills to use it in that conquest of delivering assets and infrastructure, and better value to the rate payer.