Full Needs Analysis Approach

This technique involves:

• Assess our current performance against the world's best practice
• Compare our current status with other similar organizations
• Determine the best appropriate practice targets that will derive the most cost effective benefits from advanced asset management
• Assess the gap between the current status and the best appropriate practice targets
• Understand the value of closing this gap to our overall performance in infrastructure service delivery, using our unique Business Value Chain (BVC)
• Identify the benefits and costs of closing these gaps
• Develop an asset management improvement program containing the improvement projects that are necessary to close the gap
• Determine a suitable timeframe over which these improvements should be achieved.

The key benefits of this approach are:

• The organization gets a clear roadmap that identifies all the likely projects we will need to lift ourselves to a best appropriate practice level. It encourages a healthy debate as to what are the benefits of closing these gaps
• It develops a clear budget for the entire program rather than just one year or one part of the program, and thereby allows our elected members and policy makers to gain a better understanding of the program
• It allows us to identify quick wins and projects that will represent the greatest benefit cost
• It shows us the quick-start type projects that, although they take a long time, represent the key foundations to long-term successful and sustainable asset management.

The weaknesses in this approach are:

• It can be difficult for staff to understand advanced asset management and what it means in real terms - what we will be doing differently? This problem can be overcome if we do some detailed awareness raising and training programs, which clearly present what best appropriate practice means in other organizations and what benefits those organizations have achieved in making this transition.
• We must accept that although we may rate relatively well against similar local organizations, we may benchmark poorly against world's best practices in similar industries. This requires our elected members to have a broader view of what good management really represents. We also need to believe that we will be able to replicate the benefits derived by other organizations, and this can be much more difficult.

In some countries there are government regulations and other industry models that help drive this process. At this point in the USA, it is really only a search of excellence by management that requires an organization to proceed towards this level of sophistication or quality of management, even though GASB 34 and CMOM programs do represent some form of regulatory requirement in small areas of infrastructure life-cycle asset management.