Parks managers and planners are an important part of parks management and should work with asset managers to provide sustainable long-term delivery of assets, according to Xyst Director Brian Milne.
“The planners don’t see asset management as being anything to do with them, and yet my view is asset management is all about
planning,” said Milne.
Milne, and his colleague Jayson Kelly from park planning and asset management specialist Xyst, will present on the subject of parks asset inventories and condition grading at IPWEA’s one-day intensive workshops aimed at the parks sector .
The workshop series will give practical advice on establishing and maintaining inventories and condition reports and will coincide with the launch of IPWEA’s new Parks Management Practice Note.
“We are aiming to convert the asset management language and approach, which tends to be very engineering focused, into a parks based language to make it meaningful, relevant and easily understood by parks people,” said Milne.
The practice note includes specific guidelines on how to assess some 50 different types of park assets, based on IPWEA’s 1-5 grading system.
“It is designed to be a practical tool and is very useful for training people who are doing the condition grading so that the gradings can be applied consistently,” said Milne.
According to Milne, the challenge for parks departments is to identify what information they really need to collect about their assets and ensure that information is used and kept up to date and not lost when a member of staff moves on or priorities change.
“There are lots of organisations that have gone and collected all their asset data, they haven’t used it and as a result the information isn’t maintained. It then become basically worthless within a short space of time,” he said.
Parks Management Practice Note and Workshops
Pre-register for IPWEA’s new practice note and then sign up for the accompanying one-day workshop.