Local Government New Zealand
Asset Management – Property, Buildings, Parks and Recreation Assets
For a few golden years during the early 2000’s, New Zealand, along with Canada, was the star pupil in the Asset Management class. As an industry we were leading the charge with the art of asset management and providing significant thought leadership in this space. This wasn’t just across the big players – roads and water services, but across all asset classes that our local governments were charged with managing.
However, over the years, we have lost that star pupil ranking – with many small to medium size local governments falling behind particularly in the space of our building, parks, recreation and property assets. While these councils have continued to manage their three waters and roading assets with the same vigour of the early 2000s, these ‘above ground and easily visible’ asset classes seem to be pushed to the side in terms of priority.
So what happened? And what can we do to remedy this, with all the ‘noise’ being about potholes and leaky pipes.
Councils are the front facing heroes or villains in all our communities. They can be celebrated for delivering a fantastic community facility (such as a destination playground) or they can be crucified for delivering the same project – the perspectives of the community are largely influenced by factors that often have very little to do with the said playground. If there are issues with roads, water, rubbish collection, rates increase there will always be those that criticise the local government for ‘prioritising pet projects over doing the basics’.
But these assets; playgrounds, libraries, swimming pools, community buildings, and often pensioner housing are important to the community. They provide services that are important for community and attract people to the area. Imagine living in, or near a town that had no playgrounds for children, no libraries or community recreation facilities, and there being no community facilities for gatherings. It would be difficult to attract families to the area, which would have a direct impact on the local economy. The facilities themselves contribute towards the employment of residents and they provide the ability to operate community-based programmes by volunteer groups, for the benefit of the local community.
So why are our Asset Management processes not prioritising the management of these assets’ information, like we do our Roads and Water Services?
Many small to medium councils throughout New Zealand have comprehensive asset management plans, systems and processes for their Water services and their roads. The dominant asset management system for roads in New Zealand, RAMM, is well established with most councils having a dedicated team to undertake the asset management practice for the roads; they manage the maintenance, operations, capital planning and expenditure and the asset information management, with data and information systems and processes followed to ensure that the capture of data is completed, and forward planning based on this. For water services, similar levels of commitment to Asset Management are followed, works and maintenance is captured by the asset management system, CCTV and inspections are completed in a regular manner, testing is undertaken and the results feed back into the system, and forward works planning is undertaken so that the next ten years of capital spend is planned and accounted for.
So why are we not doing this with our recreation and community assets.
For some councils, resourcing is an issue. For other councils, system awareness is an issue. And for some councils, understanding their asset base as a beginning point is a significant issue. The age old saying, ‘you can’t manage what you cant measure’ rings true in this space. Many councils want to engage with Asset Management of their community assets in a similar fashion to the way that they engage with their roads and water services, but they lack the data to start, and when they try to start, the roadblock of not having the base data overwhelms them, over and over again.
So how do Councils get past this initial roadblock so they can reach the next point in their asset management journey for their recreational assets? I could simply say – start and don’t stop until you are done. But facing reality, there are many issues with that – the resourcing that they are currently charged with is likely to not increase simply because they want to improve business practices, and those resources are typically so busy reacting to issues that they don’t have the capacity to engage in a project like this. (They may well be reacting to issues that are the result of a lack of asset management, but that none the less, does not solve the resourcing issue at the immediate time).
Alternatively, they could engage students over the summer to navigate their way round the district with a tablet to ‘capture the assets’ and feed them into a spreadsheet. But – what are the assets? What level do they need to be captured at? What information is needed? Where are the assets? What is the value of the assets? What condition are they in? How do we treat building assets? There is a complexity to this type of project that is beyond the scope of simply ‘engaging summer students’. And while summer students could be a part of the solution, there needs to be a bit more consideration to their engagement then what we have seen councils do previously.
Understanding the way that these assets classes need to be managed within the asset hierarchy is critical. Most of the assets will, independently, contribute towards a broader facility or system. For example, the rubbish bins, the communal BBQs, the playground equipment, the rotunda, and the community hall all located within one park are related and will be required to be considered at the component level, at the asset level, at the service level and at the locality level.
Here is an example: A Rotunda at a local park.
· The Rotunda itself is made up of a concrete foundation, timber frame and iron roof.
· The concrete base, the timber frame, and the iron roof are all separable components of the Rotunda Asset. They may all have their own planned maintenance activities required on them, and each of the components will also have their own base life, and replacement values.
· The Rotunda as an asset will have a spatial location attribute that the asset will be mapped through for the asset management system, and corporate GIS system, and will also need to be able to have works requests associated with the asset as a whole (For example, Customer services get a call reporting that the rotunda has had graffiti attack on it – Customer services needs to be able to allocate that works request to the Rotunda, rather than the foundation, frame or roof).
· The Rotunda forms part of a collection of park structures that needs to have an engineering inspection completed on them, so needs to be able to be categorised as such.
· The rotunda forms part of the collection of assets at Smiley Park, which also needs to be reported on annually as part of the annual summary that reports on the total value of assets at Smiley Park, the maintenance, operational and capital expenditure that has been undertaken at Smiley Park, and the proposed forward works expenditure for the park (Both Capex and Opex).
As you can see, the Rotunda at Smiley Park, is more then just one asset, and the way in which the data is captured and managed for it needs to be reflective of this.
Considering this complexity for a simple park structure, and considering the complexity of building assets, swimming pools, libraries and the likes, its easy to see why Local Governments across New Zealand are struggling to activate similar levels of Asset Management for these asset classes to what they have implemented for roads and water services. Now consider a large complex building – electrical, mechanical, structural, site services…. This list is complex and highly inter-related.
Videre Consulting have engaged with many councils in this space across New Zealand and Australia. The good news is that for those many councils that are currently utilising the Univerus Assets system (Previously, and more commonly known as AssetFinda), the flexibility that this system provides is a genuine enabler for the capture, management and maintenance of data for these asset classes. However, simply having the system will not result in success. Careful project management and oversight is needed to ensure that the project objectives, scope, inclusions (and exclusions) are well defined and clear, while also ensuring that a agile approach is taken to flex and pivot as required. Understanding the outcomes of the projects, what success looks like, and what the next steps will be is critical for the project management team to be able to shape the progress throughout. A strict, regimented approach will not work in this space, as, returning to the saying, ‘you can’t manage what you cant measure’, tracking progress on an unknown quantum (as in the assets) is very difficult. Rather, measuring project progress against the end goals, and responding to the challenges along the way in an agile project framework delivers a more successful result.
The second challenge which is very often overlooked is the change management process, bringing the current staff along on the journey is critical. They know the assets, they know the issues, the failure mechanisms and the problematic areas. It is critical that any system developed is designed to include their expertise and enable them to be able to continue to delivery the level of service that they are aspiring to be able to deliver. There is simply no use if entering all the data into an asset management system and then handing it over to them. The data will not be maintained, and in 5 years’ time, the council will be back to the starting point all over again (I have seen this happen too often). Rather, the system needs to be set up with the maintenance activities, with the contractors, with the ability to send out works requests, capture expenditure, capture condition and performance; all those elements that make asset management, asset management. An asset management system is not just a data base of assets. This is the crunchy bit to this project for any local government, and this is the area that Videre Consulting relishes.
If your council is looking holistically at their asset management practices, and their systems, has acknowledged that they need to ‘lit their game’ in respect to community and recreation assets, reach out to Videre Consulting, and let us show you, how we can help you. Our team includes an Asset Management Specialist working alongside a building and construction specialist, of whom both bring experience in drone surveys, building componentisation, aerial image capture, data standards development including hierarchy management, data migration, Asset Management practices, Infrastructure Strategy, Long Term Plans, Asset Management Planning and maintenance management planning; all critical aspects of your asset management practice at your organisation.
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