Please let us know what you need, and one of our team will get back to you promptly
Articles
Ian Jackson is an expert in strategic asset management with decades of experience. In July 2024, we sat down with Ian for his insights into the world of strategic asset management.
Strategic asset management is about understanding the role assets and facilities play in achieving the required stakeholder outcomes. It’s looking to the future, where the business is going, and working out what that business needs to do with its assets to get there.
It is strategic and future focused thinking and not to be confused with managing assets, which are the activities required on a day-to-day basis to keep everything working.
Like most things in my career, I sort of fell into it, probably because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut!
I started in asset management off the back of working as a system engineer, which is a structured, multi-disciplinary approach to design. The two disciplines are linked, so I just started learning more about it, understanding things like the International Infrastructure Management Manual, and putting that in the context of systems engineering thinking. I think that it was the systems engineering approach of being able to take multi-disciplinary/stakeholder viewpoints of a problem that helped.
I started out in defence aviation, in radar and communications systems maintenance. In the 80’s, I was working on old aircraft, operating on old technology and with that came with a range of reliability and obsolescence challenges. But our job was to keep these aircrafts going and extend their asset and operational life.
I was later able to work on at the other end of the spectrum, consulting on the development of new aircraft. Having worked with aircraft at the end of their life meant I could apply my experience of dealing with the types of problems; and apply that to design decisions so that these new aircraft would be in a better position with regard to their support and lifecycle management when they entered into service.
Well to start with, when I first started out in strategic asset management, it wasn’t recognised as that!
It wasn’t something formalised or structured, but rather there were a lot of different disciplines doing their own part of it. Back then, the closest to it may have included “master planning”, which was concerned with planning for assets for the future.
There were more isolated, or siloed, bubbles of activities happening, and over time, those bubbles have become more connected.
While the different disciplines involved in asset management have become more connected, it’s still not completely integrated. It would be so beneficial if we could get systems engineering, master planning, architects, facilities managers, maintenance teams etc. to all work together and be part of the same equation.
It is well accepted that there are so many benefits to taking a holistic approach from the start.
Unfortunately, there is rarely the budget or willingness to commit to doing so, which comes from the top. I have heard a government minister being interviewed on the radio about investing in new infrastructure, and them talking about delivering value for money. When pressed on what that means the response was “lowest cost projects”.
It made my blood boil to hear one supposed “leader” advocating for lowest capital cost and not lifecycle cost, willingly prepared to take the plaudits today and let my granddaughter pay for that lack of foresight in the future.
If you have the right people involved in projects from the outset, you can build more efficient systems and deliver maximum value. You need to know what data you’re going to need for effective asset management at the start and can build systems and processes around that.
It is really important to be adaptable. You need to be able to listen and take experiences and stories and translate those into other contexts. Adaptability helps in thinking about viewpoints of all stakeholders and their needs. For example, if you’re building a new building, you need to think about what the board wants, but also make sure the cleaners can do their job. I love telling the story about how Heathrow Airport had to employ tightrope walkers to change the lights in their new terminal!
Technical skills can always be learned, but you need to have a natural adaptability and a willingness to really communicate up and down the management chain.
In recent memory, I worked on a project where the organisation had a high value asset that needed to be able to be operated across multiple, geographically dispersed sites.
Because of the distance between sites, the asset needed to travel with spare parts as a backup plan. Over time, of course different parts fail at different rates, so every time something broke, a spare for it would then get added to the subsequent backup packs.
Eventually, the number of different items in that pack started getting out of hand and it wasn’t feasible. The organisation wanted our help to prioritise and rationalise what to take in the backup pack.
With my experience, I knew we had to attack the problem from a different angle. Rather than asking “what spares do we have?” starting with “what’s the goal for this asset while operating in this region?”.
I worked on developing a methodology, which considered what the asset would be doing and what systems were critical to achieve that. We looked at historical data, activities performed, asset failures, spares consumption, replenishment costs etcetera.
Once we tested it, we were able to use that algorithm each time the asset needed to go to another site and optimise the pack for that event. Saving a lot of money, time and improving uptime and operational outcomes.
It was really rewarding, we achieved a fantastic result for the client and managed to solve a complex problem with a simple solution.
Keep on top of all the latest news and articles.
Subscribe to us today!