Applied Asset Management Service Offerings
Strategic Asset Management Planning
Align your Infrastructure Vision, Plan, and Objectives with Community Goals
In today’s world, you need leading strategists to boldly go where no infrastructure has gone before, daring to think differently and align with community goals. Applied Asset Management offers Strategic Asset Management Planning services to encourage Public Service and Infrastructure Managers to radically expand beyond the traditional technical and regulatory context and strategically think long-term with infrastructure. We are strategists with vision and innovation.
Recognizing the Problem
Alignment between community master plans and daily public services activities is one of the most difficult challenges for organizations. Organizations frequently have excellent long-term strategic plans at the top management level but fail to persuade or communicate to the very people that perform operations, maintenance, and administrative activities. Making matters more difficult, senior leadership and elected officials frequently interpret infrastructure needs in a different ‘language’ than the technical managers that oversee it. These problems cloud requests for much needed resources to get work done on infrastructure, which results in disparate opinions, resistance to change, and lost trust among the very employees crucial to delivering outcomes.
Alignment
Alignment begins with understanding that existing business practices may have likely evolved from cultural dysfunctions by predecessors in past generations. Our experience managing within municipal organizations empathizes with the challenge of aligning your key performing employees to community outcomes. This is particularly true with today’s Environmental, Social, Good Governance and Climate Change priorities. Therefore, Applied Asset Management Consultants uses a universal framework of helpful best practices within the Strategic Asset Management Plan tailored to your organization. Our facilitation process engages employees from management to field operators and builds organizational solidarity and develops infrastructure long-term objectives that align with community outcomes. The importance of focusing on alignment to build agreement and trust is commonly overlooked and will help you to achieve the goals outlined in your master plan.
Diverse and Inclusive Engagement
As we expand our context on the possibilities of infrastructure value, we engage a diverse array of organizational personnel containing valuable institutional and business knowledge through a consensus-building process. Through interviews and group discussions, we extract their viewpoints on what impedes realizing the potential value in the infrastructure they manage. We are strong advocates for the institutional and innovation value that field staff, operators, and maintainers bring to solving the frequent problems that plague alignment. We have found the best innovations are garnered from diverse and inclusive stakeholder engagement within open conversations that enables understanding the challenges through the eyes of the field operator.
Decision-Making
The municipal planning and budget decisions are made within processes that are loosely coordinated while attempting to recommend millions or billions of capital spending to a governing authority. Confusion, mayhem, scrutiny, and “redo” are not uncommon as the capital improvement plan passes through various gates of authority within an organization. Whether operations, maintenance, or capital investment decision-making, any recommendation must be aligned with organizational and community objectives. We use leading best practices to tailor a transparent and documented decision-making processes for organizations. We are successful at engaging various decision-makers at all levels to map the process, draw criteria, and leverage asset science in support of value, alignment, and transparency. The result is a capital improvement plan that fulfills the regulatory and technical needs of the infrastructure but adds value with a focus on community objectives and triple bottom line priorities.
Going the Extra Mile
Our broad municipal experience enables us to understand how bumpy the road may be in your organization’s journey toward achieving its long-term objectives. Therefore, we help you assess and treat the risks that often distract or derail an organization’s journey, such as physical age of infrastructure or cultural barriers. We also gauge human assets from field supervisors to the senior management responsible for implementing strategic plans throughout your organizational structure There is tremendous value in understanding your human assets and overcoming department dysfunctions and barriers that impede strategic plan implementation.
We’ve been in your shoes and understand the value and benefits of managing change through sponsors and bold leadership by navigating the risks that cloud organizational alignment.
Asset Management Gap Analysis and “Roadmap”
Helping you begin your Asset Management Journey
Practicing the science of Asset Management can be intimidating with terminology that seems like an arm’s length away from your reality. Society has been managing infrastructure for centuries, therefore, where does an organization really stand in its skills level and journey of Asset Management? Applied Asset Management will help you establish the benchmark in your journey and create a strategic ‘roadmap’ to focus energy in the areas your specific organization skills to improve your human capital, from the novice to experts in Asset Management.
We administer the Institute of Asset Management Maturity Assessment tool to an array of employees from operators to senior leadership. As IAM trained and Asset Manager Professionals, as well as former municipal managers, we breakdown the maturity assessment into relatable examples of your current practices and activities for ease of assigning the most appropriate rating. We translate assessments into visuals to easily benchmark current Asset Management competency levels. From there we facilitate consensus building to construct a “roadmap”, closing the gap toward an achievable set of competency milestones and goals for an Asset Management journey, customized to your team and done your way!
Some state regulatory agencies or state Asset Management Councils have developed their own readiness assessment tools to complete and submit for eligible funding assistance. Submitting a completed assessment may unlock available funding to increase your Asset Management level of practice and competency for your municipality. For example, this has been a popular vehicle for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. Applied Asset Management administers, completes, and submits on our client’s behalf these state-authored readiness assessments.
As strategists, let us help you construct a “roadmap” so you may begin a journey in achieving a higher level of Asset Management expertise to realize more value from your organization’s infrastructure assets.
Managerial Capacity Studies & Assessments
Remove barriers impeding greater sustainability of Public Infrastructure
For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has empowered states with tools to help municipalities assess Technical, Managerial, and Financial capacity in delivering drinking water in accordance with the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act.
We assist clients that have been issued regulatory Administrative Consent Orders to perform a required Managerial Capacity Study. Managerial capacity is defined in the Guidance on Implementing the Capacity Development Provisions of the 1996 SDWA Amendments (EPA 816-R-98-006, July 1998) as:
“The ability of a water system to conduct its affairs in a manner enabling the system to achieve and maintain compliance with SDWA requirements. Managerial capacity refers to the system’s institutional and administrative capabilities.”
Our extensive training and municipal business experience allow us to provide this unique service utilizing the tools of Asset Management. We have studied municipal agencies and have helped Public Services Departments, Capital Improvement Delivery Offices, and Infrastructure Divisions in completing and submitting for regulatory approval their managerial capability study.
We add additional value by using the proven techniques of Lean Management and shadowing field operations to understand where barriers exist that impede efficiencies in organizational activity. Typically, barriers exist in systems that no longer create the value they were intended from years of disinvestment and poor managerial cultures. Therefore, we interview managers, superintendents, and supervisors that are directly responsible for managing various programs and activities that field crews, engineers, operators, or maintainers perform. Our specialized toolkit includes:
- Interactive managerial time assessments that map activity and time over a calendar year cycle.
- Gap Analysis using the ISO55000 Asset Management Maturity Assessment tool to benchmark the current journey and develop your future “roadmap” to increase competency levels.
- EPA Managerial Capacity Indicator Assessment that covers a wide range of technical, managerial, and financial topics.
Our process culminates in easy visuals that indicate your organization’s managerial capacity. Our clients see a vast array of benefit and value from a Managerial Capacity Study, including:
- Ability to message resourcing needs in a universal language understandable to senior leadership, elected officials, and external stakeholders.
- Organizational charts that strategically show personnel increases to improve managerial capacity for the needs of the organization.
- Documented and transparent capital investment and O&M decision-making processes based on science and agreeable criteria.
- Improved succession planning and professional development in strategic areas of focus.
- Clarity of management and supervisory roles and responsibilities.
- Better use of resources for operations, preventive maintenance, incident response, and capital improvement delivery.
- Identifying leaders with a strong sense of emotional intelligence that can use ‘people’ smarts in managing highly productive cultures.
- More organizational coordinated activity that increases its capacity to realize value from its infrastructure assets.
Let us help your organization assess its managerial capacity and build a transformative plan toward greater sustainability and value to customers.
Business Operational Excellency
Create better Value through Good Governance
Municipal operations are part institutional and part business, yet both must have a focus on Operational Excellency. We teach clients models of good governance with efficient business operations that produce effective outcomes.
“Asset Management is an organization’s coordinated activity to realize value from its assets.”
~ Institute of Asset Management
Coordinated activity emphasizes the highly efficient field programs, operator procedures and administrative processes that add value. With a $1.25T Federal Infrastructure Bill, good governance helps municipal agencies stretch grant funding opportunities and deliver capital projects on-time, within scope, and under budget. We also know there are multiple approaches to solutions, therefore, we consult municipal clients on alternative delivery methods for capital construction projects.
Service sampling of Business Operational Excellence include:
- Lean value stream mapping of processes, programs, and activities to improve performance, alignment, accounting, value realization, and employee morale.
- Lean A3 modeling for business case justification for large operational or capital initiatives.
- Succession Planning
- Resource Management
- Alternative construction delivery methods
- Asset Risk profiles for executive, managerial, and supervisory level monitoring.
- Operational “Box Scores” to review and monitor Business Objectives.
- Project Management for Municipal Agencies to improve project controls and reduce costs.
- Team productivity and leadership development for improving business cultures.
- Capital Investment Decision-Making Process transparency and best practices
- Managerial Capacity Studies
We conduct in-person and virtual teaching sessions so you can learn and apply these principles and practices on your own. We also develop implementation plans to leverage technological platforms for even greater efficiency.
We have a strategic alliance with PSMJ Resources, Inc. offering an in-person and virtual 3-Day Project Management Bootcamp for Public Works Agencies to improve your capital project delivery process.
We have the municipal business expertise and experience to help you continuously improve toward Operational Excellency!
