Opportunities in Asset Infrastructure
Interested in learning more information on certain Asset Management topics? This page is dedicated to blog posts that dive into various topics within these webpages. Learn about similar experiences and helpful opportunities within your Asset Infrastructure.
Embrace LEAN Thinking within a Municipal Environment
Blog Post | September 14, 2020Has this COVID-19 crisis made your work environment extremely challenging? The answer may be ‘yes’ if you are trying to navigate infrastructure services with many of your personnel working from home. From another angle, your municipal organization may have exhausted considerable funds with its COVID response, and likely tightening budgetary expenditures. So, what does all this mean? How do municipalities truly navigate the ongoing COVID crisis so they can emerge somewhat financially resilient? The answer is LEAN Thinking applied to infrastructure Asset Management practices.
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COVID-19 and Reconstructing Organizational Resiliency - Free Webinar
Blog Post | July 31, 2020The COVID-19 crisis has turned municipal infrastructure budgets upside down with skyrocketing community response expenditures and a steep rise in unemployment just the beginning. Now is the time to test every infrastructure decision to see if it supports resiliency and sustainability objectives.
We have put together a webinar (below) on using lessons hard-won from the Great Recession to learn battle-tested strategies to optimize public agency funds and resources to close budget gaps and get projects back on track. Plus, you will learn how effective alignment of organizational activity may enable municipalities to capitalize on potential Federal Capital infrastructure opportunities.
In this one-hour live webinar, you will learn:
- Short-term concepts that focus on optimizing organizational activity.
- How to seize the opportunity to reconstruct organizational resiliency through contingency planning and risk in the context of post-COVID-19 crisis.
- What you need to do to get ‘ahead of the curve’ regarding potential long-term effects of how the public may view and use infrastructure.
- Ways to capitalize on investment opportunities in the event of a Federal Infrastructure investment.
Project M.P.H or M.P.G?
Blog Post | April 13, 2020Remember the 1970’s when oil embargoes and gasoline prices were the hot topics in global politics? The era of the “muscle cars” was just starting to transition into smaller, lighter and more fuel-efficient vehicles. The national speed limit was reduced from 70 to 55mph since engineers and scientists could prove that 55mph would yield the most efficient gas mileage for a vehicle. My Dodge Omni couldn’t climb a hill, but it got 52mpg traveling a highway speed of 55mph over flat land. So, the question becomes, what is the optimal speed projects must travel through your process in order to get the most efficient gas mileage? Crazy as it sounds, there is a correlation.
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Organizational Resiliency during Unprecedented Times
Blog Post | April 7, 2020Are the activities and business processes you use to manage your assets in good order? Are they as efficient as possible? Are they effective at what they do?
While working for a municipality during the Great Recession, it took almost 4 years before we regained financial health and performance. It was “all hands-on deck” in figuring out ways to remove a $33M gap in our general operating fund budget. And if that wasn’t bad enough, we had an historical flood event that continued to test our resiliency as a municipality and our mental toughness as professionals. Having trimmed our staffing levels to meet significantly reduced tax revenues, there was nowhere else to cut. What we did instead was to take a hard look at the business processes we performed as a department and organization. What better way to emphasize the definition of Asset Management, “the coordinated activity by an organization to realize value from its assets”.
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Human Capital Asset Management
Blog Post | February 26, 2020One of my favorite movies is “Miracle”, the story of the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team that won over the heavily favored and seemingly unbeatable Russian hockey team. The Russians, seasoned, skating together since they were kids. The Americans, young, talented, but just college age and never have skated together as a team until they first met at try-outs. Now one might be curious as to what does the 1980 USA Olympic hockey team have in common with Asset Management. Surprisingly enough, a lot!
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A Formal Management System Dedicated to Infrastructure
Blog Post | July 2, 2019Owners have been taking care of their physical assets for centuries. We take care of everything we own like cars, boats, and homes; and when it comes to the corporate side, it’s infrastructure. Infrastructure supports the very things we use whether it’s the car we own to drive, or the roads we use to drive our vehicles on. In either case, formalized systems are put into place in order to afford us the things we use. For example, the manufacturing industry uses several internationally recognized Quality Management Systems to produce and sell vehicles at the lowest possible competitive cost. In more recent years, professionals in areas such as IT, Engineering, Architecture, and Construction, design their Project Management System (PMS) within their organization to holistically manage capital projects in a sustainable manner satisfying their strategic and business objectives. Read Blog Post