2024 New Year’s resolutions - Getting things done through communities

It’s definitely too late to say Happy New Year. However, as is customary in January, I’ve been doing some thinking about New Year’s resolutions.

TL;DR

This year I’m aiming to…

• Be better at teamwork and get things done through communities,

• Do more leading and less directing, and

• Reduce my ego and help others to shine.

Short story long…

The power of communities

My main resolution for this year is to try to get things done through communities rather than being directive and task orientated.

Photo by Shane Rounce

I guess there’s something to be said for realising the limits of our own abilities as individuals. It’s natural to think about our plans from the perspective of the self:

• “I’m going to do X”

• “I will achieve Y”

• “I will finish Z”

Very few things are delivered by one person in isolation – the reality is that to do almost anything, we are dependent on others.

That doesn’t mean to say projects don’t have leaders or that ideas aren’t important. The main point is – given the size of my ambitions – I need the help of others. And that means I need to elevate my leadership approach.

Rather than me do all the things, or me give all the things to others as tasks, I need to work to inspire others around an idea. To achieve my goals, they need to match the goals of others so that we’re all trying to help each other.

Leading not managing.

Direction not directing.

A typical career Arc

Relevant to this is some of what my mentors have been helping me with around my leadership development.

While this has been helpful for me, I do appreciate we’re all individuals and there is no right or wrong career path. That said we could summarise a “typical” career arc into 5 modes. 

At the start of our career, we spent most of our time learning how to do things. As we get more experience we start to do more things, we are better at what we do and can start to do it independently.

Initially this doing is still part of that learning mode, but as we get more confident and experienced we are able to deliver work independently.

As we get more senior and more experienced, we start to manage the doing of work. We take more ownership of our own work and eventually will start to manage the work of others.

I’m currently learning how to be in the next stage of my career around leading. Specifically I’m finding leadership is less about managing tasks, telling people what to do and how to do it. I’m finding that leadership is more about inspiring others around the idea or the outcome that you’re trying to achieve, and then empowering managers to own a plan of how to deliver tasks that align with the delivery of that overall outcome.

The 5th mode of the career is around counselling others. I think the objective at this point is to have built up enough knowledge and wisdom that your counsel, your views and opinions, have value to others around you. In this final mode of the career it seems to be less about getting stuff done. I think it’s more about being a sage advisor sharing experience and thoughts.

A key point here is that these modes are not rigid but overlap entirely. Everyone should be learning. Most people, regardless of how wise they are, still have to get things done. Some of the best learning moments I’ve had have come from the counsel of junior colleagues through their observations and questions.

It seems useful to me to reflect on the balancing of how much of each mode we hold at different times in our career.

My current focus is on trying to be such a good leader that I am able to empower those leaders around me, creating a virtuous feedback loop. The leader matrix!

We all have ego

In psychological terms, it can be understood that we all hold in our minds an internal constructed model for what “good” and “bad” looks like. Our ego is simply a way of describing how we mediate between the conscious and the unconscious and how we test reality against that constructed model.

Photo by Yeshi Kangrang  

While the detail behind that is probably for a different post, I think it is worth making an important caveat that the concept of ego is only a model. This can be useful for exploring who we are and how we relate to others and the world more broadly. However, like all models this is not reality itself but a representation of reality.

Having said that, the premise of the model is that we all have an ego – it’s normal and part of what makes us who we are. What can be useful is acknowledging that:

1. Our ego can help us – it can fuel our sense of pride in the work that we do, satisfying that constructed model in a way that drives us to do excellent work,

2. Our ego can get in our way – where we might feel that others are not satisfying that constructed model, driving us to feel that we need to control things in order to correctly satisfy that constructed model.

For me the watch out is letting my ego drive me to obsess over the detail of the deliverables of which I feel ownership - leading to me being directive and controlling. Even worse this can lead to me being personally less productive as I let perfect be the enemy of adequate.

Main thing is just to be mindful of my ego and to be considerate of my actions in the context of what I’m trying to achieve.

Am I helping to achieve the goal or am I just trying to satisfy my ego?

Communities I would like to build and/or contribute to in 2024

(1) My day job

I love working for Mott MacDonald. I am consistently blown away by how hard working and professional my colleagues are. So it’s the perfect environment to work through communities - encouraging others to be at their best as I try to be at my best.

My main focus in my day job this year is going to be around trying to reduce my ego. I want to let brilliant people shine.

While others might solve our challenges differently to how I would - I’m trying to focus more on ‘whether we met the challenge’ rather than ‘whether my “answer” to the challenge was the one we delivered’.

(2) Henry Washington

I’ve been working on a screen play for years now. I think again my ego has been holding me back here. Because I wanted to write it myself, I’d only shared the idea with a few people. Which in hindsight was a bit silly as (1) it’s incredibly unlikely someone is going to “steal” the idea or something and (2) if someone does “steal” the idea I can always point back to this blog post. Ultimately it’s not “my” story - it’s about Henry Washington (I’m writing a more detailed post about this which I will link here when done).

Credit British Library

I always remember Theo Paphitis (on Dragons Den) asking someone -

“Do you want 100% of nothing?”

Better to risk the idea being in the world with the chance of happening than being locked away in my head doing nothing.

The other thing about getting the project out there is hopefully, by having an open mindset working through a “Henry Washington community”, it will be easier for others to join the project rather than “compete” with it.

(3) Centre for asset studies

Last year was incredibly exciting for our think tank. We gained more supporters and contributors and published several articles. And a tremendous highlight was being invited to speak at the Annual Conference of the Institute of Asset Management, sharing some of our case studies and joining Ursula Bryan (CEO of The Institue of Asset Management) at her Inclusive Infrastructure Panel.

However, I’ve also been personally frustrated that I’ve not been able to get as many ideas out of my head and into published content as I would have liked.

Reflecting on this, we have loads of articles that are 90% complete. While I pride myself on being a good “starter finisher” (i.e. I get stuff done) I’m also aware that I have massive ambition, and I’m constantly committing to do more than I personally have capacity to deliver.

Again – reflecting on my ego, I think I have an enormous amount of pride in the work that we are doing with the centre for asset studies. Our mission is to improve the social and economic impact of the built environment – which maps pretty much 1:2:1 to my internal model of “good”. I think this is leading to “Perfect being the enemy of the adequate” where I sometimes struggle to release content because I have excessively high standards.

Applying my resolutions again, the Centre for Asset Studies is another community to build, where I need to empower our supporters and contributors to deliver more. I need to put more trust in the team to get articles over the line and ready for publication. And importantly, I need to accept that it’s okay if things aren’t always perfect. Our publications only need to be good enough to share ideas in an engaging way.

(4) The Institute of Asset Management

My role volunteering as the Communications Director for the UK Chapter of The Institute of Asset Management, is all about building a community. My core purpose is to drive engagement between our membership and our Chapter, and our community and the wider world.

In the first instance, my main focus in this role is to prioritise time to connect with the other UK Chapter Directors. Too many times last year I was late to, or missed, our regular meetings. To be effective in this role it is fundamental that I’m present and connected with the leadership team.

The second goal is to better lean on our membership. This is less about directing volunteers, but again about empowering them. The institute is built by and built for our asset management community, so harnessing that immense talent has got to be the way forward.

Thanks!

If you enjoyed reading this, please consider subscribing for occasional updates to when I’ve shared something new. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

P.S.

If you have any reflecting or thoughts, please do let me know.

To address climate change, political mandates need to get less political

(Quick note - while this is slightly political, I’m trying not to make it about individual politicians or political parties. For the avoidance of doubt, all views are my own).

TLDR

• Climate change is real, caused by humans, and this is bad.

• The ULEZ (on balance) is good.

• Political wrangling is making it harder to form a coherent strategy on the scale required to address climate change.

Short story long…

(views are my own!)

The climate is still changing and it’s still because of human activity

While it’s difficult to point at a specific event as evidence for a trend in something as massively complex as the earth’s climate, the current out of control wildfires do make for a dramatic and very visual representation of global warming.

A firefighter walks next to rising flames as a wildfire burns near the village of Vati, on the island of Rhodes, Greece, July 25, 2023. REUTERS/Nicolas Economou

The scientific consensus strongly supports the idea that human activities, especially the emission of greenhouse gases, are the primary drivers of modern climate change. You don’t need to take that statement at face value - there are heaps of studies and climate models that have all come to the same conclusion:

The IPCC

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is an authoritative international body that assesses scientific research related to climate change. Their assessment reports are based on extensive research conducted by thousands of scientists worldwide. These reports consistently show that human activities, particularly the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation, are the primary drivers of global warming and climate change. The latest IPCC reports and supporting information are available on their website.

The CMIP

The CMIP (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project) is a collaborative effort among climate modeling centers worldwide to improve and compare climate models. The CMIP models have been used extensively to study climate change and its potential impacts. While CMIP models encompass a range of scenarios, the majority of them demonstrate that human activities significantly influence the observed climate change. The CMIP and their model data is accessible through the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) website.

NASA

NASA's Global Climate Change centre provide comprehensive information on climate change, including the role of human activities. NASA's scientists have contributed significantly to understanding climate change through satellite observations, data analysis, and climate modeling. On their website, you can find various articles, reports, and visualizations that support the conclusion that climate change is largely caused by human activities.

Point being, climate change is real and human made greenhouse gases are the cause.

Was the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election a referendum on the ULEZ?

So in the context of the planet being on fire, we come to the recent Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election results, where it’s been widely reported that the election became a referendum on the expansion of the ultra low emissions zone (ULEZ), which is an environmental policy of the current Elected Mayor of London.

This seems to have raised the idea that pushing back against action to tackle climate change is somehow a vote winner.

The assumption being that if the by-election was a referendum on ULEZ, then ULEZ lost. But did it?

In reality elections are messy and complicated- and while I’m sure some people were swayed by the ULEZ issue - most voters have multiple, often contradictory reasons to vote one way or another. Beware anyone offering single issues: it’s the economy complicated stupid.

Either way, the outcome from the election has been lots of political analysis and questioning about whether the public will vote for environmental initiatives like ULEZ. I’ve heard it positioned as: most people want to stop climate change but most people don’t want to accept any inconveniences to do so.

This is obviously nonsense and pretty insulting to the public.

The majority of people accept that climate change is happening. Most people are capable of understanding the concept. Most (two thirds in recent polling) people agree we need to take more action.

And I really don’t think people are so short sighted that they’re unprepared to be inconvenienced. I think we as a society- and especially our political leaders - have failed to articulate a coherent strategy that people can buy into.

A single consideration like ULEZ can be a hard sell in isolation. But ULEZ in the context of everything else would be palatable.

I’ve written before in support of the ULEZ and while it’s not perfect it is on balance a good initiative.

The ULEZ as part of the Mayor’s Transport Strategy

So in that context, I’d highly recommend reading the Mayors transport strategy.

(Note: I didn’t have anything to do with writing it but have been involved in helping to implement bits of it through my day job.)

I won’t comment on the strategy directly (aforementioned day job). However I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that because it needs to be a political document as much as an actual practical strategy there some compromises in it that require interpretation.

I mean - That’s baked in. An elected mayor’s transport strategy is going to be linked to the elected mayor’s democratic mandate.

The Political and Strategic context of the ULEZ

The impact of the mayor’s transport strategy being political is that TfL’s funding is also political.

So in that context, we should consider the current settlement between the DfT and TfL, which intends for London to be the biggest city in the world without a public subsidy for its public transport network:

“…TfL will … fund day-to-day operations through our normal revenue sources…”

How TfL is Funded

In my view this is quite a cynical political play by our government- to underfund London’s transport infrastructure, force the Mayor to raise local funding through things like the ULEZ, then attack the Mayor for implementing the ULEZ in the Uxbridge and South Ruislip by-election. Presumably this will continue in the coming mayoral elections.

I guess the most charitable interpretation would be that the government genuinely feels that there isn’t enough money at a national level to fund regional transport, and that this should be funded by the users locally. If this is the case, it’s a pretty flawed concept. It’s well known that better public transport is better for the environment and better for the local economy encouraging investment and worker mobility. When we make it easier for people to get from where they live to where the jobs are and it’s easier for companies to find workers. Cars are inefficient and low capacity compared to buses and trains.

Let’s be clear, the conspiratorial styled reporting that the ULEZ is about TfL raising funds, is true. TfL have to raise revenue and the ULEZ is a way of generating revenue. There’s actually a pretty strong argument that, if funds have to be raised, then raising them from road vehicles is worth it to subsidise public transport which is more energy efficient, more economically efficient and better for the environment.

Again being clear, if the ULEZ is generating money then that does by design mean less money in the pockets of people. I find it disingenuous when arguments are made that X group won’t be impacted, or that it’s fair because of Y accommodation. Money is changing hands and that will have an economic impact. And while it is quite easy for someone driving a modern ULEZ compliant car  to down play the effort of navigating the system to replace a noncompliant vehicle- it should not be forgotten that the people most likely to be driving a non compliant people are also the least likely to be able to navigate the system. I grinds my gears how quick people can be to judge others we know nothing about. There’s a whole other world that people live within right under our noses. Households of Multiple Occupation: literally multiple whole families living in houses originally built for one. People working multiple minimum wage jobs to put food on the table. These people are the most likely to be effected and most likely to struggle work out what to do about it. I digress…

Another huge problem with the ULEZ charges is that the charges aren’t being fully offset by discounts to more environmentally friendly alternatives.

Needing to be self funded, TfL are now making tough decisions about which services it can afford, and what services need to be reduced, how they can make the limited funding go further and how they can increase revenues.

Inevitably this means that TfL investment in environmental initiatives is going constrained. There are always financial constraints- however it would seem the current constraints on London are significantly harsher than any equivalent sized city in the western world.

Unhelpful Politics

For me, one thing that is very frustrating about all of this is the lack of coordination with national strategy or policy. Climate change is such a big of a threat to humanity, we need an aligned approach from national strategy through to local implementation. We don’t have time to be messing around here.

One of the most consistent arguments made by the engineering community is to separate short term politics from long term transport strategy. Given we’re staring down the barrel of climate change we need meaningful actual policy, objectives, strategies and plans.

The big challenge for London / south east will always be getting political organisations lined up.

An example of misalignment local to where I live

Consider the (now indefinitely postponed) metropolitan line Watford extension, which for a relatively modest investment would have significantly improved connectivity (more people closer to public transport options) and functional resilience (alternative journeys in case of closure of one of the lines). It would objectively be the best thing for the people of Watford and for the people of London.

Despite it mostly being funded by the public, the flow of money got mashed up within different authorities (National, County, Borough, London) who couldn’t get aligned on who should fund what and by how much.

The three main UK political parties were represented and when the project collapsed they all blamed each other.

It is easy to blame individual politicians for failing to prioritise the scheme - however each authority’s internal incentives ultimately caused them to make the decisions they did. The answer is to provide unifying incentives external to each authority, but aligned to a common strategy. Again - we need a coherent strategy to respond to climate change. We need leadership and vision.

One of the central ideas we’ve been pushing at The Centre for Asset Studies has been about alignment. One of our first papers we published discussed a proposed plan for northern infrastructure investment to create a single urban centre with sufficient economic gravity to rebalance the UK economy.

While that proposal is an interesting line of thought, a plan that grand would depend on a lot of people getting behind it. Big improvements are possible: there are countless feats of engineering that demonstrate this is the case. But for any of that to happen we need clear leadership and vision.

Thanks for reading

Appreciate this post was a bit longer than usual, and skated around some political issues.

If you enjoyed reading this one (or didn’t), please let me know. Always keen for feedback!

And as ever, if you did enjoy it, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone who you think would like it!
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Computer Models for Asset Intensive Businesses

In a recent blog post I mentioned I would write a post about what computer science aspects would mean for Enterprise Asset Management.

By coincidence, I recently proposed a framework to describe the different types of computer models that can be used by businesses, especially from an Asset Management perspective.

So as well as meeting that promise, I’m also keen on getting feedback from the wider asset management and infrastructure management community on this framework – if you have any thoughts, please do get in touch via LinkedIn here or through this blog here .

TL;DR

• Data models - hold and serve data

• Information models - put data into context

• Optimisation models - find solutions to problems

• Generative models - make up data from existing data

Short story long

All businesses use models. The computer revolution means that Microsoft applications like Excel or Power BI are ubiquitous. Finance use models to help with things like management accounts or tax liabilities. HR use models to understand things like absence or performance. And Asset Managers use models to understand things like which asset interventions are required and when.

The following framework attempts to differentiate between these models in terms of their complexity or “evolution”. This is important, as understanding the form of output that each type of model can achieve, can help frame what kind of model might be needed for a specific business requirement.

The framework is summarised in the following diagram. Below that, I’ve tried to add further context and detail.

Data Model

As discussed, all asset owners have some level of data models. Data models are about understanding available data, and while this isn’t always as sophisticated as the headline grabbing capabilities of a generative model like ChatGPT, data models are really important to the functioning of any organisation or business (or society in general).

A slightly more formal definition of a data model would be “a conceptual representation of data and how it is organized and structured within a database or information system.”

Data models can be represented using various notations, including Entity-Relationship Diagrams (ERDs), UML (Unified Modelling Language) diagrams, and textual descriptions. Populating and using these notations is a bit of a specialism!

Point being, a data model defines the way data is stored, accessed, and manipulated, so that the data can be interrogated.

Information Model

Information models are about putting data into context to create meaningful insights.

A more formal definition on an information model would “be a conceptual framework that defines the structure, organization, and semantics of information within a particular domain or context.”

Information models serve as a bridge between the abstract representation of data and the technical implementation in databases or information systems.

Generally, information models are built from existing data models. It’s typical for organisations to have some information models, however the extent of connectivity between those models to create the context is usually where the challenge exists.

An important difference between a data model and information model, is that an information model provides a high-level representation of data and how it is related, without getting into the specific technical details of how data is stored or processed.

A key attribute of an information model is the relationships that define how entities (the specific data) are connected or related to each other. These connections show how information flows or interacts within the model. Relationships can be one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many, depending on the nature of the connections.

Another key attribute is the information model semantics, which describe the meaning of the data to help understand the significance of data elements and their relationships.

Optimisation Model

This is about making more connections between datasets and insights than could be done manually and using heuristic models as an equivalent of modelling every possible scenario to find the best choice.

A more formal definition of an optimisation model is “a mathematical or computational representation of a problem designed to find the best solution among a set of possible solutions.”

The models are used to systematically analyse, evaluate, and make decisions regarding various factors or variables while aiming to maximise or minimise a specific objective or set of objectives, often referred to as the objective function.

The objective function quantifies the goal that needs to be optimised and defines the logical relationship between the decision variables and the objective. For example, this could be “to minimise cost of asset interventions”.

Something that can sometime cause confusion, is that we often talk about minimising objective functions as minimising the “cost”. This isn’t a financial cost but is a way of describing the value of an objective function, where we might use penalties for outcomes we don’t want and rewards for outcomes we do want. If that didn’t make sense (I’ve witnessed many confused conversations between computer scientists, engineers, and accountants over the years) don’t worry – the point is just that with an optimisation model ‘minimising cost’ probably isn’t talking about money.

Another attribute of optimisation models worth discussing is decision variables: These are the specific data that can be controlled or adjusted to influence the outcome of the problem being optimised. Decision variables represent the choices or decisions that need to be made. For example, in Asset Management Whole Life Cost Optimisation, these variables would be things like volume of maintenance vs volume of renewals.

The last attribute to discuss (although there are many more) would be constraints. Constraints are mathematical expressions that limit the values of the decision variables (and therefore constrain the optimisation model. A good way to think about this, would be optimising a railway passengers’ journey. The optimum journey would cost £0, would have zero safety issues, and would take zero seconds. Obviously, this is impossible – the constraints are what make the solutions considered possible solutions. While input data is intuitively required for any model, it is especially important for any optimisation to have enough data to constrain the model to reality (or at least close enough to reality to be useful).

At the core of any optimisation model, is the Optimisation Algorithm(s). To find the optimal solution, the model will rely on one (or usually many) computational algorithms. There are many, and people are coming up with new ideas and ways of optimising all the time:

1. Enumeration: For simple problems you can just calculate every possible solution. The first question should always be – do I actually need to optimise or can I make the problem small enough to enumerate!

2. Random Search: An optimisation method that explores the solution space by randomly sampling points, often used when the search space is poorly understood. Quite good for an initial exploration for theoretical or intangible problems.

3. Gradient Descent: An iterative algorithm used to find the minimum of a function by adjusting model parameters in the direction of steepest descent of the gradient. Can be quite fast, but in my (admittedly out of date) experience can get stuck in local optima (rather than finding the global optimum)

4. Hill Climbing: A simple optimisation algorithm that iteratively makes small modifications to a solution to find an optimal or locally optimal solution. While this is generally a poor way to find the global optimum this can be quite useful for optimising from known scenarios towards a local optimum. For example, in asset management it’s typical to manually produce a small set of future asset management intervention scenarios – something like (1) following manufacturers recommendations, (2) early renewal, (3) high maintenance, (4) low maintenance. A Hill Climbing algorithm could offer slightly improved scenarios from those “base” scenarios that are likely to be fairly sensible.

5. Genetic Algorithms: (this was my jam at uni) A search heuristic inspired by the process of natural selection, where populations of potential solutions evolve over generations to find optimal or near-optimal solutions. The really cool thing about this, is the cross over and mutation aspect means that you can find solutions from across the whole solution space.

6. Differential Evolution: An evolutionary algorithm that uses the difference between candidate solutions to create new ones in the search for optimal solutions.

7. Simulated Annealing: A probabilistic optimisation technique inspired by the annealing process in metallurgy, used to find the global minimum of a function by accepting occasional uphill moves with decreasing probability.

8. Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO): An algorithm that simulates the social behaviour of birds or fish, where particles in the search space move towards the best-known solutions.

9. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO): An optimization algorithm inspired by the foraging behaviour of ants, where artificial ants explore a solution space and leave pheromone trails to find the optimal path.

10. Tabu Search: An iterative optimization algorithm that maintains a short-term memory of visited solutions and uses taboo lists to avoid revisiting previously explored areas.

11. Linear Programming: A mathematical technique for finding the optimal solution to a linear objective function subject to linear inequality constraints (limited use as a primary optimiser, but quite helpful within a model, especially for a discrete or variable set within a model – for example this could be used to optimise a specific node within an artificial neural network).

12. Integer Programming: Similar to linear programming, but it deals with discrete decision variables rather than continuous ones, often used in combinatorial optimisation problems (can be quite coarse but very useful to speed up working through known sections of the solution space where you don’t want to waste computational effort).

13. Quadratic Programming: A mathematical optimisation technique for solving problems with quadratic objective functions and linear constraints (quite a nice solution where there are harmonics within the dataset, although you generally would need lots of experience with the problem and using optimisation to know the timing to apply this).

14. Dynamic Programming: An optimisation approach that breaks down a complex problem into smaller subproblems and solves them recursively, often used in sequential decision-making problems.

Ultimately, optimisation models provide a systematic and quantitative approach to decision-making by identifying the best course of action given a set of constraints and objectives. There are certainly specific areas where optimisation is being applied (for example pipe network optimisation, railway track rail wear models). The main limitation to date has been having adequate volume of data of sufficient quality to train the models.

Generative Model

Generative models repeatedly model scenarios to train an “artificial intelligence” that uses learned patterns and connections to generate new data or content to form part of the insights provided. The point here is that they have a form of intelligence in that they’re generating new data that is similar to, and often indistinguishable from the data that they have been trained on.

It’s worth noting that these models have gained significant attention in recent years due to their ability to create realistic and creative content, such as text, images, music, and more. That said the whole “intelligence” aspect is a bit thin – there is no free will and - as of yet - no models are able to escape the paradigm of their training data. Basically, new material isn’t created it is generated. There’s a philosophical point about perceived creativity: If I think, therefore I am, then if I think that you think, are you? I digress…

Generative AI models are typically based on deep learning techniques: that is, artificial neural networks with huge amounts of training data). I think that’s why we like to think of them as intelligent, because the core learning network is similar to a biological function.

However, there is so much to talk about here, I might do another post on how artificial intelligence works and how it is applied in engineering systems.

Something that is worth mentioning is the ethical and legal aspects:

Firstly, training these models requires available data and ownership of that data is quite interesting. The actual models are like black boxes, where they’re so complex (and often constantly updating themselves) we can only ever take a snapshot in time of what the algorithm is doing, and even then they’re built from pure logical functions without semantic meaning. If I walk around an art gallery, get inspired and create some art – did I take something from the original artists? Or more to the point, did I take something that someone owned?

The second big aspect is that the training data comes from an imperfect world and so is inherently biased by it’s training set. I was going to go into lots of detail, but this post is already quite long. Main point here is that there have already been examples of models reinforcing racial and gender bias’s (which catch headlines) but those bias’s will also effect other things. For example, imagine building a whole life cost model using a training data set from organisation A, that training data will include the historic organisational attitudes to risk of organisation A. When applied to organisation B, that bias could lead to outputs outside of organisation B’s risk tollerance.

Anyways - the point here, is not to dwell on the challenges related to the ethics of generative models, but to acknowledge that we need to face into the risks as well as the exciting opportunities.

Reflecting on how models have been applied within infrastructure asset management, these applications have largely been held back by the lack of available training data. What’s really interesting is the opportunity to use generative models to make up for this shortfall in data (as would be required for a standard optimisation model) and instead use massive volumes of data from multiple sources (like the open internet and the closed intranets of companies) to build intelligence that could help to translate poor quality and incomplete data into useful data for future modelling.

Future Models!

That last point touches on specific project I’m part of. Building on some strategies we’ve developed for applied modelling for asset management use cases, I’m looking to run some pilots with real world data. So please do get in touch if this is of interest!

Additional Notes

Models are Models

Something always worth repeating is that a model really is a just model. It’s limited by assumptions and simplifications – without getting too philosophical, it’s not actually possible to truly replicate the thing being modelled – even if we completely duplicated the thing being modelled, the foundational elements will always be different. Taken to extremis this can transition from mathematics (logic) to physics (quantum building blocks).

Optimisation is a defined term.

Another side rant, and I know it’s probably not normal, but I do get quite wound up about people using the word “optimisation” incorrectly. Comparing a couple of scenarios is ranked selection: “Out of these 5 scenarios which one is better”. Optimisation is estimating every possible solution, to understand not better, but the best. One way of doing this is enumeration (calculating every possible scenario) but even simple problems can have a massive number of solutions beyond human (or computational) ability to calculate. This is where heuristics comes in – trying to demonstrate you’ve done the equivalent of an enumeration calculation but by reducing the number of calculations to something achievable.

P.S.

If you liked this article, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone who you think would like it!

Communications Director for The UK Chapter of the Institute of Asset Management

I’m very excited to have joined the board of the UK Chapter of the Institute of Asset Management as Communications Director. This is a big role that I intend to take seriously.

Here are 3 things I want to achieve:

(1) To Connect

What is life if it isn’t the connections that we make - interactions that enrich our shared human experience. TheIAM is all about helping industry professionals to connect, share and learn from each other. As we come together to explore concepts and mash ideas together, we each improve our own understanding and often create new configurations of ideas or new ideas entirely.

Smart people make each other smarter.

(2) Make a positive impact

I’m a massive geek when it comes to asset management. I love it. I want to share that passion - helping to build a structured approach to our communications and marketing. This will help connect our membership to the chapter, to each other, as well as promoting best practice.

Now is the right time.

(3) Learn and grow

I also hope that this role will give me opportunities to learn, enrich my own experience, and better understand myself. Specifically - I’m keen to build my confidence presenting and get better at using technology to improve my productivity.

Be comfortable being uncomfortable.

Next steps

I’ve agreed an initial plan with the rest of the board. The first tasks are (1) get set up with all the existing tools and accounts. (2) getting into a regular rhythm of email updates to our membership. (3) getting coordinated with our colleagues who look after Assets Magazine.

Thank you!

There wouldn’t be anything to communicate if it wasn’t for the huge amount of hard work by the many thousands of asset management professionals in our community, our membership, and the institute's staff and volunteers.

And on a personal note, a massive thank you to Stewart Whyte, the UK Chapter Chairperson, and also to the rest of the board, for giving me this opportunity to contribute to the Asset Management Community.

P.S.

It’s a ridiculously exciting time at the Institute. More structure, more members, more events, more connections. If you want to know how you can get involved in the continuing professionalisation of the asset management industry, drop me a message.

Hope in the face of climate change

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing humanity. Yet, I recently saw some information published by Our World in Data which made me more hopeful about our ability to adapt to the changing climate.

Why do we need to adapt?

Climate change is having a significant impact on the frequency and intensity of natural disasters around the world.

The effects of climate change, such as rising temperatures, sea level rise, and increased precipitation, are leading to more frequent and severe natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, and hurricanes.

The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events is projected to increase as the planet continues to warm [1].

Warmer temperatures can lead to more intense heatwaves and droughts, which can lead to increased risk of wildfires.

Sea level rises caused by the melting of ice sheets and glaciers can lead to more severe coastal flooding during storm surges.

Warmer oceans can lead to more intense hurricanes, as the warmer water provides more energy for these storms to develop.

All of these natural hazards impact the built environment, our homes, our work, how we travel, and pretty much every aspect of our lives.

The climate is changing and we need to adapt.

Man made climate problems

Human activities are responsible for the majority of warming since the mid-20th century [2]. The burning of carbon intense fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas) releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, which trap heat and cause the planet to warm.

This warming is causing the climate to change, leading to the increased frequency and intensity of natural disasters.

To be human is to adapt

The story of human civilisation is one of humans adapting their environment.

Humans built shelters to protect themselves from the elements, developed agriculture to tame vegetation to produce food, and created systems for transportation and communication.

Throughout history, human civilization has grown and changed as people have adapted their environment to suit their needs. We have transformed the natural environment to create cities and towns, built infrastructure such as roads and bridges, and developed systems for governance and social organization.

All these changes to the built environment around us allowed for the growth of human population and the development of complex societies that have shaped the world we know today.

And so it follows that we would adapt our civil infrastructure and the built environment to cope with the increasing natural disasters caused by climate change.

We’ve been building stronger and more resilient structures, such as buildings, bridges, and infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather events and rising sea levels. We use more durable building materials, such as steel and reinforced concrete, as well as building codes and regulations that require structures to meet certain standards for strength and resilience.

We’ve created green spaces and natural areas, such as wetlands and forests, that can absorb and slow down water during heavy rainfall and storms, reducing the risk of flooding. This green infrastructure, includes everything from massive constructed wetlands, down to local sustainable urban drainage systems (I’m a big fan of SUDS) like making our driveways from permeable materials.

Local and regional governments have created early warning systems and emergency response plans to help communities prepare for and respond to natural disasters. This may include things like weather monitoring and forecast systems, evacuation plans, and emergency shelters.

In coastal areas, seawalls, dikes, and other coastal defenses have been constructed to protect against sea level rise and storm surges. These structures can be built to be higher, stronger and more resilient to withstand the increasing intensity of storms and waves.

Adaption successful!

And so the data would suggest that humanity is successfully adapting to cope with natural disasters caused by climate change. Despite the global population increasing from 1.6 Bn in 1900 to 7.8 Bn in 2020, and despite the continuing worsening of our climate, it would seem that we are better able than ever to cope with the impacts of natural disasters with far fewer deaths due to natural disasters. [5].

Climate problems require climate solutions

Just because we are adapting, it doesn’t meant we shouldn’t try to limit or reverse human impact on the climate.

As the climate changes, natural hazards will become ever more extreme. This will require more resource intensive mitigations that will be more expensive. If allowed to continue, the changing climate will overwhelm our ability to adapt. The poorest nations will feel this effect first but eventually all of humanity will be impacted.

In the first instance it is absolutely essential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to cleaner sources of energy.

References:

1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), https://www.ipcc.ch/

2. United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), https://unfccc.int/

3. "Climate change, natural disasters, and adaptation" by the Environmental Defense Fund https://www.edf.org/climate/climate-change-natural-disasters-and-adaptation

4. "Climate change and extreme weather events" by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-extreme-weather

5. “Decadal average death rates (world) from 1900 to 2020” Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/decadal-average-death-rates-from-natural-disasters?country=~OWID_WRL

6. Urban Drainage, Second Edition, David Butler and John W. Davies (2004)

The Future is Slow: How Low Speed Rail could revolutionise UK rail capacity

I recently co-authored a paper at the Centre for Asset Studies where we argue for investment in low speed rail. The full paper can be found at the think tank’s website here.

But long story short…

1. Rail is environmentally friendly and efficient, which is good.

2. UK passenger rail faces capacity constraints, which is bad.

3. Investment in new low speed freight routes would be better than investment in new high speed passenger routes

Northern Mega City

New paper published discussing a proposed plan for northern infrastructure investment to create a single urban centre with sufficient economic gravity to rebalance the UK economy.

Go to paper at the centre for asset studies website here

Rail Station Accessibility: When £20 million is not a lot of money...

The government recently announced a £20m “funding boost” for accessibility across 124 rail stations.

£20 million, to most individuals, really is a lot of cash. And any additional investment in train station accessibility is good.

For many people, the rail network is extremely challenging to use.

Quite a few years ago I did some fire engineering design training*. Trying to navigate without eyesight (wearing a blind fold) is both terrifying and difficult. Not only did it change how I considered the design of a built environment, but it also gave me some appreciation of the importance of designing for accessibility. Platform tactile paving, for example, literally is a matter of life and death.

Further- The things that make stations more accessible for disabled users tend to make the stations better for all users.

For example: Lift access to platforms is fundamental for wheel chair users. Lifts are also safer and more convenient for passengers with big suitcases. And additional lifts provide additional overall capacity.

So is £20 million enough additional investment in accessibility?

It’s not clear from network rail reporting how much is currently spent on station accessibility.

If we look at £20 million in the context of network rails recent £3,577 million in annual operational costs, this doesn’t seem a lot.

Network rail only operate 20 out of the 2500(ish) UK train stations. Point being we can conclude that £20 million is a relatively modest funding boost.

If we divide £20M between the 124 stations allocated thats roughly £160k per station- which in railway terms is not a lot: For example, in a recent estimate the “Cost for the design, supply, and installation of the lift mechanisms and enclosure themselves would be in the region of £750,000 to £1.2 million.”

That would again indicate that £20 million is a relatively modest funding boost.

What can we conclude from all this?

I don’t doubt that this funding boost has good intentions. And any increase in funding is a good thing overall.

I believe that it is fair to judge the success of a train station on how accessible it is for the least mobile in society.

Generally, UK train stations could be a lot better and I would argue that £20 million is inadequate to make a big difference. And for me, a big difference is exactly what is required.

What else have I missed?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please do leave a comment below, or message me directly.

P.S.

If you enjoyed this article, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone else who might like it. And as ever, if you think I might be able to help your organisation, please do get in touch!

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REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING:

• News post on gov.uk by the Department for Transport and The Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP - https://www.gov.uk/government/news/rail-stations-across-great-britain-receive-20-million-funding-boost-for-accessibility-improvements

• Network Rail Limited Annual report and accounts 2019 - https://cdn.networkrail.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Annual-report-and-accounts-2019.pdf

• Estimated cost of a passenger lift at a railway station: EIR release - https://www.gov.scot/publications/foi-18-03026/

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*This experience had a tremendous and lasting impact on me. Some of the first-hand accounts from former firemen reduced the room to tears.

The next high-speed rail boom?

When we think of railways in Africa, we might imagine gigantic post-colonial steam trains, bouncing along old rickety tracks in clouds of dust, steam and smoke.

Image Credit John Gaydon

Yet Morocco is smashing that picture, operating a successful, modern, high speed railway.

Africa’s first high speed rail line, running from Tangier to Rabat, has just recently celebrated its first anniversary. And Morocco’s national operator, Office National des Chemins de Fer (ONCF), have plans to extend the rail network to 20 cities and 14 airports by 2040.

Both Egypt and South Africa have plans in place for new high-speed rail routes. And all across the South-Asia Pacific there are high-speed rail projects.

So, are we seeing the start of a high-speed rail boom? To answer this question, we need to look at some context.

A brief history of railways (and high speed railways in particular)

Railways were pioneered in the UK, during the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century. The age of steam shrank the world with railways connecting not just British towns and cities but quickly being rolled out across the British empire, and within other industrialised nations.

During the first half of the 20th century we saw massive growth of passenger use, and a transition from steam to diesel and electrically powered locomotives.

Through the second half of the 20th century we saw a diversification of rail use. Some countries, many of those that pioneered rail use originally, saw the gradual replacement of railways with planes and cars. Railways were still in use, but typically with diminished budgets and a general approach of ‘managed decline’.

Notably, countries with large geographies like the USA, Australia, Kenya and Tanzania started using rail for efficiently moving freight rather than slowly moving passengers. Los Angeles to New York takes roughly 5 hours by plane or 3.5 days by train.

Meanwhile countries with more suitable geographies, and governments willing to invest, started building dedicated high-speed passenger railways. This is especially useful for connecting city centre to city centre (avoiding the hassle of getting to/from the airport).

France and Japan took the lead in this area, eventually competing with each other to build faster and faster high-speed trains.

Around the turn of the century, up to today, more countries began investing in high speed railways. With a steady development of high-speed rail projects across most of Europe and China.

Today we see plans for high speed rail projects across the Middle East, and with wavering commitment across the South Asia Pacific and each coast of the USA.

Railways in Africa

Which brings us back to the ‘Al Boraq’ high speed railway in Morocco. Connecting the Northern Port of Tangier with the capital, Rabat, and the main commercial hub of Casablanca.

The Al Boraq project started in 2011, with help from the French state through SNCF. French built TGV trains reach 186mph (300kph) along the 225 mile (360km) journey and take 2 hours and 10 minutes end to end.

The initial cost of construction, and cost of future renewals are met by financing, with project funding comprised of Direct investment from the Moroccan government, French led European investment, and commercial loans.

Income from rail fares are currently enough to cover cost of operations and maintenance.

The bet is that the overall investment will lead to growth in overall productivity in Morocco. This will lead to increases in tax receipts, with the difference being larger than the costs of servicing the investment loans.

Economies are complicated systems dependant on many factors, but all things being equal it is a fair assumption that improvements in infrastructure will lead to improvements in economic development. And historically, there are clear examples of railways having a hugely positive economic and social impact.

The start of a boom?

The Al Boraq project has been successful (so far): daily Passenger numbers on the route have increased from roughly 7,500 up to 10,500 per day and this seems set to continue. So given this success, it seems probably that Morocco will continue to invest in high speed rail.

More generally, we are living in an age where interest rates are low, debt is cheap, and traditional “low risk” financial assets, like government bonds, are offering poor returns for investors.

Image Credit Paul Schmelzing, Bank of England

Government backed infrastructure projects offer a win-win for both government and financial investors – where government backing reduces risk for investors, the debt affordability reduces risk for government, and infrastructure utilisation offers stable returns for all.

The countries who pioneers the development of high-speed rail are growing close to saturation. There are, after all, only so many cities that can be connected. As Ashley Barratt asked recently, “is the west reaching peak infrastructure?”

Such countries are looking to exploit their knowledge advantage, and keep these engineers employed. Nearly all western rail infrastructure managers have subsidiaries to export services. The UK’s Network Rail has ‘Network Rail Consulting’. France’s SNCF has ‘SNCF International’. And so on.

If you add all of this together, then yes we could well be seeing the start of the next high-speed railway boom.

What else have I missed?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please do leave a comment below, or message me directly.

P.S.

If you enjoyed this article, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone else who might like it. And as ever, if you think I might be able to help your organisation, please do get in touch!

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References and further reading:

ONCF, 2020 - https://www.oncf.ma/fr/Entreprise/Profil-de-l-oncf/Historique

JOHN GAYDON, 2017 - https://steamtrainstories.com/author/john-gaydon/

Groupe_oncf, 2020 - https://www.instagram.com/p/B2C3nn-Bgq9/

Paul Schmelzing, Bank of England, 2020 - https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/working-paper/2020/eight-centuries-of-global-real-interest-rates-r-g-and-the-suprasecular-decline-1311-2018

SNCF International - https://www.sncf.com/en/sncf-around-the-world

Tech, Infrastructure and the Future

It’s often premised that Tech companies are going to change the world, and this includes disrupting how we will build, maintain, replace and dispose of infrastructure.

This article is about why tech companies are probably not going to disrupt infrastructure management directly. And how tech is going to indirectly impact the infrastructure management industry.

TL;DR -

1. Don’t expect google (et al) to be putting any asset management and engineering consultancies out of business any time soon.

2. Do expect the role of asset management and engineering consultancies to change.

Firstly, let’s define what a tech company actually is

A ‘tech company’ (to me at least) is a company that uses technology to disrupt an existing market, with products that, once built, have a very low additional cost for each additional paying customer. This is often called a “zero marginal cost” model.

Tech companies are often funded by venture capitalists, betting that their upfront investment will deliver zero margin, and therefor practically unlimited, returns.

Herein lies the first massive difference between the tech world and the infrastructure world:

In infrastructure, initial investment is defined by the construction (once a bridge is built it is built). Returns are limited by the physical infrastructure (a train can only fit so many passengers).

In tech, initial investment is undefined. Lean software development has led to a world where it’s basically impossible to say a product is “finished”. But, importantly, returns are unlimited.

To take google search as an example, the costs associated with an additional user searching on google are thousandths of a cent (we can consider close to zero) - whereas the commission revenue from each user searching is measured in dollars per day. Given the capture of search by google, returns are limited only by how many billion people are using the internet, and how much of the rest of the economy is online. However you cut it, the initial investors in google have made monumental returns.

So, tech favours agile rapid development to quickly iterate between solutions, with massive rewards for finding zero-margin products and services.

In tech there are few prizes for perfecting a product before you’ve proven it has a market. Competition is fierce so it’s all about racing through iterations until you find those zero-margin returns.

As Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg put it:

“Move fast and break things”

Which, is about as far as you can get from infrastructure management, where the equivalent expression would probably be:

“Move at a reasonable pace and absolutely do not break anything, ever”

If a web search calculation is wrong, you might have an inconvenient couple of hours of inefficient searching. “Why can’t I find the website I’m looking for?”

If a train signalling calculation is wrong you might end up with a massive train crash, with loss of life, massive costs, and potentially jail time for company directors.

So, the typical use of technology in infrastructure management has high consequences and constrained returns. Or in other words, exactly the wrong model to interest tech companies (or tech investors).

So, how might tech influence infrastructure management?

To answer this, let’s look at the fundamental paradigm shifts in technology over the last 50 years:

Big shift 1) moving from mainframes to personal computers.

Big shift 2) moving from desktop applications (on personal computers) to the internet, with virtual servers running almost unlimited computational power on demand.

Big shift 3) moving from the internet accessed on desktop computers to laptops, then to PDAs then to mobile phones (and fridges and home sound systems). Ubiquitous internet!

And if we overlay how this has impacted infrastructure management:

Big shift 1) moving from huge teams of engineers and technicians transforming calculations or records to feed into mainframes, to small teams or individuals using personal computers in an office.

Big shift 2) moving from desktop applications with engineers feeding data into personal computers and worrying about storing and using data locally, to feeding internet connected systems with virtual servers making information shareable and retrievable around the world.

Also within shift 2 - the scope and scale of Calculations has become virtually unlimited accessing almost unlimited computational power on demand.

Big shift 3) moving from manual data entry based on desktop computers to the “Internet of Things” and/or “Smart Infrastructure” where humans provide assurance that the assets are monitoring themselves correctly.

We, in the infrastructure management community, are currently living in shift 3, while the tech companies are busy working on the next shift. (how about ubiquitous internet implanted directly into your brain?)

So if tech companies aren’t going to directly enter the infrastructure advisory business...

...then where next for tech in infrastructure management?

Well, as a general observation big shifts don’t happen suddenly, we just suddenly realise the shift has happened. While tech PR would have you believe that their next product is going to change everything, actually it is adoption that changes things.

I’m reminded of a joke I first heard at a seminar by Dr Hillson:

3 frogs are sat on a log.

1 of the Frogs decides to jump off the log.

How many frogs are on the log?

3 frogs are sat on the log.

Saying something is not the same as doing something.

Point being, In these predictions I’ve tried to ignore product hype and focus instead on what’s being adopted in the real world.

Prediction 1

And so, my first prediction would be that we remain on a steady trajectory- that is, there won’t be a revolutionary change but a continuing evolution.

Ubiquitous internet, and the expected deployment of 5G, will lead to more “smart infrastructure” and remote monitoring of assets.

The cost of remote monitoring is likely to continue to drop, widening the portfolio of assets for which there is a business case for connecting to the internet.

The increased bandwidth offered by 5G will allow for more data to be collected and transmitted.

Highly criticality assets will be able to provide real time condition monitoring and real time capacity utilisation monitoring.

If you want to label it, we could call this the digitisation of reliability centred maintenance.

Prediction 2

Automation and Machine Learning will continue to increase the general efficiency of people who work in infrastructure management.

The define what I mean by automation and machine learning- it’s simply training a computer how to recognise certain inputs and provide a prescribed output.

In basic systems engineering we often breaks things down into an INPUT, PROCESS, OUTPUT model.

Well automation and machine learning is just where we’ve massively increased the input data, and used some more complex maths in the process, so that we get better and more reliable outputs.

Take for example a thermostat. Traditional thermostat took inputs of target temperature and current temperature. If it’s too hot, the output is to turn off the heating. If it’s too cold, the output is to turn on the heating.

Well, a “smart” thermostat (like nest, although other products are available) might use much more input data, like what temperature do you want the room when occupied, or when empty. Add some sensors so it knows when the room is occupied and it will vary the temperature accordingly. Add a time series and it can start to predict what temperature the room should be based on when it thinks the room is likely to be occupied and when the room is likely to become empty.

In this way a “smart” thermostat can reduce energy use as the heating is only switched on when it’s needed. And the possibilities go on- is it really hot? Probably a fire. Is it really cold? Probably a Window open. Is the room occupied at a weird time? Maybe let the owner know in case its someone who shouldn’t be in that room. And so on.

The point is- In the same way that we now have shared digital calendars as standard for pretty much every aspect of every job, we’ll start to see automation and machine learning tools permeate into the workplace as well.

Let’s call this a machine shift.

Prediction 3

So combining prediction 1 (digitisation of reliability centred maintenance) with prediction 2 (machine shift) we get to prediction 3: that effort in infrastructure management will change most dramatically in two main areas, assurance and innovation.

Staff who currently inspect infrastructure directly will, over time, instead be providing assurance that the “smart infrastructure” is functioning correctly. Inspection staff will also provide a ‘validation’ that the condition reported by system is the same as the condition in real life.

And similarly, staff who renew or build infrastructure (in both design and delivery) will over time be more preoccupied with working out how to deploy smarter infrastructure.

An impact of this will likely be fewer inspections (with an associated drop in workplace injuries). From looking at the impact of reliability centred maintenance generally, we would also expect to see improved performance and reduced uncertainty.

We will also likely see greater infrastructure complexity. This may in turn impact upfront cost as well as increase project risk – given that more complex projects have more opportunity for error.

What have I missed?

I’ve limited this article to 3 predictions, and I know I’ve missed a lot. Big things I’ve missed are:

Green Shift - the impact of the drive for environmental sustainability. Probably a continued reduction of energy and material use, as well as a switch from carbon to green forms of energy.

Working Practices - social trends for flexible working and reduced working hours. We once thought that when the robots did all the work, the humans could live in a form of utopia. Well the robots are owned by some of the people and those people don’t seem to be that keen on distributing the wealth those robots are generating…

What else have I missed?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please do leave a comment below, or message me directly.

P.S.

If you enjoyed this article, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone else who might like it.

If you look after physical assets, I would love to help your organisation get the best from tech. Please do get in touch!

We need to talk about asset management

Any organisation that is responsible for physical assets would benefit from a joined-up approach to the overall system by which those assets are looked after.

As previously discussed there is a distinction between managing assets (the things you do to assets) and asset management (the overall system by which an organisation achieves its strategic objectives through it’s assets).

Yet in too many minds- asset management is only the concern of engineers and maintenance staff.

If we want to improve this, we need to find ways to teach people who don’t ‘manage assets’ about asset management, why asset management is important, and how they’re connected to asset management.

This article lists out a coupe of tips for having conversations about asset management. It’s not in any way exhaustive, so please do comment with your own suggestions below.

1. Start with a Smile

Everybody is human, so connecting on a human level is going to be a good place to start. If you want to land any message, you want the other party to want to listen.

If you’re negative people will switch off and disconnect.

If you’re positive, sincere and passionate, people will be much more ready to listen to what you have to say.

2. Be respectful of the other person - are they available?

Building on the first point, if you want someone to listen, they need to be available to hear you.

Imagine the situation: you’re in a lift, on your own, waiting to go up to the office floor where you work. The Chief Financial Officer gets in. He knows everything there is to know about finance, but has never really connected with asset management. Sounds like this is time for your perfectly rehearsed “elevator pitch”.

But wait! Before launching into the benefits of asset management, you absolutely must check they are ready to listen. “How are you” goes a long way. For all you know they might have had the worst day imaginable. Likewise, they might have had the best day. And that should absolutely impact how you talk to them about asset management, if you should at all.

3. Avoid acronyms

What is the point of an acronym?

At their best they save you a few tenths of a second. And being charitable, if other people know the acronym, using them like a shared secret code can bring you together.

But that highlights when acronyms are at their worst. Acronyms are exclusive terms that hinder communication. They create a form of secret club for ‘people in the know’. Worse still, they make less confident people feel stupid for having to ask you what they mean.

Generally using acronyms is a way of demonstrating knowledge. A better way of demonstrating knowledge is talking in plain language and being understood.

The other reason why acronyms can be unhelpful is that they can lead to confusion.

I remember once talking to someone for at least an hour about “RCM”, before we realised, they were talking about “remote condition monitoring”, and I was talking about “reliability centred maintenance”.

We’re all human and it’s not the end of the world to use the occasional acronym. Generally though, acronyms aren’t going to help you spread asset management concepts to non-asset managers.

4. Don’t assume knowledge

Which neatly leads to the next point about assumed knowledge. It’s quite normal to use our own frame of reference and our own personal experiences, to construct explanations of concepts.

As with acronyms, if people don’t have your reference point, they might feel too embarrassed to ask, or just generally switch off from the conversation.

5. Talk about things that matter to both of you

So aside from things to avoid, what should you talk about? Ideally you want to find things that overlap between your interest and theirs.

In great organisations there will be overall strategic objectives that unite the whole organisation. If you’ve successfully developed Asset Management Objectives, that align to the overall organisations strategic objectives, then this can be a good place to find common ground.

6. Use practical examples

Quite often the things that matter to both of you will lead to a practical example to do with your work. Even if they don’t, you can usually find examples outside of work.

For example, I often talk about a garden fence when explaining the concept of whole life cost. I might pose the question “is it cheaper to paint the fence every year, or let it rot and rebuild it?”

Why all this is important

Ultimately, good asset management saves money, increases production and reduces risk. If we believe that asset management is good, we should want to share the knowledge and practices of asset management far and wide.

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If you enjoyed this article, the best compliment you could give me would be to share it with someone else who might like it.

And please do comment below with your tips for talking about asset management.

Please do get in touch if your organisation needs help with asset management training!

Asset Management is more than managing assets

TL;DR

Thinking about asset management as just maintenance of assets misses potential value. Just as all senior leaders should have a basic understanding of the legal, financial, and commercial aspects of their business, any senior leader of a physical asset owning business should have at least a basic understanding of asset management.

What is asset management?

Asset Management, is about having a structured, methodological approach to the ownership of physical assets. The overall methodology is what we call the asset management system. A document that sets out the asset management system is known as the asset management system framework.

Science is the application of logic to life. Engineering is the practical application of science to solving problems in society. Asset Management is an engineering discipline, focused on the application of logic to the ownership of physical assets. 

A scientist might ask “what are the different solutions that exist for this problem?”. An engineer might ask “how can I solve this problem?”. An asset manager would ask “which problems do I need to solve and by when?”.

Managing assets is about the day to day work to maintain functional outputs. Asset management is not just about managing physical assets. This is certainly one part of asset management, generally delivered by engineers and maintainers. But there are other parts as well.

We’re all asset managers

Asset management should include the whole of a business which owns physical assets. Beyond the engineers maintaining assets, Finance teams should be asking “what are the costs and returns of our physical assets?”. Commercial teams should be asking “how do our physical assets generate or cost us value?”. Legal teams should be asking “what are the risks (both threats and opportunities) associated with our physical assets?”

It’s often, especially in large businesses, valuable to have a specialist asset management function. But it is vital for that function to work across the full breadth of the business. While it is the responsibility of the asset managers to speak in a way which can be understood by the rest of the business, it’s also the responsibility of the rest of the business to work with the asset management function to deliver the overall business objectives.

Asset management is about deploying an approach that maximises the value of the physical assets while minimising the whole life cost.

Maximise asset value...

Value generally refers to the good things we get from the assets. We typically try to define functional outputs of asset groups and systems, aligned to the delivery of a businesses overall strategic objectives. 

...Minimise asset cost

Costs are generally things we want to minimise or avoid. Costs can be monetary as in day to day operational expenditure, like maintaining assets. Costs can also be longer term capital expenditure like building new, or replacing existing, assets. 

Costs can be negative risks, environmental damages, injury to staff or the public, loss of future revenue or regulatory fines or penalties. 

Whole life costs are simply these costs extended over the entire life of the assets - all the way from design, delivery, utilisation, replacement and eventually demolition or decommissioning. Worrying about the cost of today is valuable. It is more valuable to worry about the future cost, and especially what this might mean for future shareholder returns.

Why all this is important 

An asset management system is only as good as the people using it. A well structured asset management system framework, with active participation from across a business can add tremendous value.

All professionals can benefit from a well structured asset management approach. It is easier to run the accounts when you have a clear list of assets. It is easier to procure insurance if you know what risks you have.

Fundamentally, adoption of asset management techniques across a whole business will make it easier to deliver the organisations strategic objectives. Specifically those related to the production or output required from the physical infrastructure. 

Ensuring that commercial and customer facing teams are engaged in the asset management system will ensure alignment of output to customer requirements. And giving the customer what they want is good! 

Last (but by no means least) senior executives following a structured asset management approach are more likely to exploit opportunities and mitigate threats.

September 2019 Update

This post was originally published on the 4th July 2019.

Since then I’ve had a fantastic discussion with David McKeown, one of the leading thinkers in Asset Management and Board Member of The Institute of Asset Management. David alerted me to an ISO Technical Committee article that he, Terrence O'Hanlon, and Thomas Smith published on this subject, back in May 2017.

The full article is well worth a read and is freely available on the ISO website: Managing Assets in the context of Asset Management.

Why do asset managers care so much about “line of sight”?

“Line of Sight” is all about how an organisation is organised around its core reason for being, and how this is visible to all the people engaged with that organisation’s delivery.

As a rule, organisations should have a point. The point of a railway is to move things from one place to another place. The point of a power station is to produce power. And so on.

Another way of describing the point of an organisation, is the organisations ‘unified purpose’: The thing that everyone in that organisation is there to do.

There is a very famous story about President John F. Kennedy visiting NASA during the space-race. During his visit, Kennedy asked a janitor what he was doing. The janitor responded:

“Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon.”

“Line of sight” is about making the unified purpose of the organisation obvious to everyone who needs to deliver that purpose. That includes the President and that includes the Janitors.

Where does “line of sight” come from?

Honest answer – I’m not really sure where the expression comes from (if you know please do comment below or get in touch!).

However, the concept is well defined within the ISO 9000 family of standards about quality management systems first published in 1987 and last updated in 2015.

Essentially, these standards say that the point of an organisation should be written down, so that people know what the point is. It also advises that you might need to be more specific about the point of the organisation for specific people.

So why are asset managers so excited about “Line of sight?”

As I mentioned in a post last week:

Engineering is about using logic to solve problems. Asset management is about applying engineering logic specifically to the ownership of physical assets.

This doesn’t explain why we care about solving problems, which is where Line of sight comes in. Asset managers want to solve problems so that the unified purpose of the organisation is delivered.

Brilliant asset management presents a clear line of sight. Where the purpose of the physical assets is understood by everyone delivering that purpose. From senior management, to accountants, to maintainers, to operators.

While it very much depends on the specific organisation, the documents typically considered to define the asset management line of sight are set out in the following table:

View fullsize

Simplified Asset Management Line of Sight, © 2019 Joe Inniss Consulting Ltd.

While this is a simplified diagram, it is worth making some notes:

The asset management objectives should be mutually exclusive. That is to say, they should not all be achievable at the same time. Consider a rail passenger going from one place to another place, by train. The perfect journey is instantaneous, free and has zero safety risk. In reality, there will be some compromise between journey time, safety, and cost.

The asset management strategy might also be called a strategic asset management plan. Without being too niche, it’s not always got the same name, but an organisation should have a strategy for asset management.

Would you like to know more?

How this aspect of ISO 9001 is applied in asset management, is described in detail in the Institute of Asset Management Subject Specific Guideline 1, 2 & 5 - Asset Management Policy, Strategy and Plans as well as Asset Management – an anatomy.

ISO 9001 can be purchased directly from ISO.

The BSI have significant experience in both the quality management standards (ISO 9001).

P.S.

For help defining or improving your asset management line of sight, please do get in touch, or find out about how I can help you!

The documents that are professionalising asset management

Asset management is one of the fastest growing engineering disciplines. Engineering is about using logic to solve problems. Asset management is about applying engineering logic specifically to the ownership of physical assets. By agreeing how to apply this logic and codifying this agreement, we can go about experimenting and iterating with our approach to asset management. And so, in this codified way of doing things and continuous improvement, we make asset management a profession.

And make no mistake – asset management is big business. Physical assets are the foundation of every economy on the planet. Even modest asset owning companies are worth more than small countries. And large organisations can be worth hundreds of billions. Take 3 examples: ExxonMobil holds over $250 billion of physical assets, EDF $170 billion and Highways England $185 billion.

Subject Specific Guidelines

At the cutting edge of professionalisation of asset management are “Subject Specific Guidelines”. These are a series of publications designed to expand and enrich asset management knowledge building on the 39 Subjects in “Asset Management - an anatomy” .

In 2016, the Institute of Asset Management launched the first 4 Subject Specific Guidelines covering 9 of the 39 subjects. Since then a further 5 subjects have been covered, leaving 25 subjects remaining.

So, when and how are the subject specific guidelines being completed?

When? As soon as possible. Many of them are in progress and it is hoped that they will all be completed within the next few years.

How? Through working groups comprised of volunteers like me. I’m currently leading the development of Subject Specific Guideline 34: Management of Change. We have a fantastic team with experts in the planning and delivery of changes in organisations, operations, projects and of course, the physical assets themselves. Between us we have over 80 years professional experience. All the authors of all the subject specific guidelines are volunteers from the asset management community. We aren’t paid for this work.

Why Volunteer?

Which raises an obvious follow up question, why volunteer? There are lots of reasons why people volunteer to write subject specific guidelines, but here are the 3 main reasons for me:

1. Let’s be honest – a huge motivator is for recognition and publicity. As a freelance consultant, it’s a pretty helpful way to get noticed by potential clients.

2. Let’s be even more honest – I’m a massive geek and I genuinely love asset management. Not only does this work help professionalise our industry, it helps my knowledge stay current. To write one SGG, you need to have a handle of all the other SSG’s plus other documents like the anatomy.

3. Lastly, but not leastly, being part of the team has been a lovely way to network and meet like minded individuals.

If you’re interested in volunteering, or want to know more about the SSG’s, why not get in touch with The Institute of Asset Management today?

P.S.

For help improving your asset management tools and processes, please do get in touch, or find out about how I can help you!