What makes an asset management team work?
Short answer: An asset management team works when it combines four kinds of strength that rarely live in one person: understanding of the business and its service goals, broad technical knowledge of the assets, analytical skill with data and risk, and the facilitation and communication skills to bring other departments along. The team's job is not to own the assets. It is to help the whole organization make better decisions about them.
Do not hire a platypus
Organizations often write a job description for one person who is an engineer, a data analyst, a finance expert and a diplomat. That person is very rare. Build a complementary team instead, where each member's strengths cover another's gaps.
The core questions
- Why do we need a team at all? Because asset management crosses every department. Someone has to coordinate the plan, the data and the conversation.
- Where should it sit? Close enough to leadership to influence decisions, and close enough to operations and maintenance to be trusted.
- Who do we need? People with the four strengths above, and the curiosity to learn the rest.
- How do we keep them? Clear purpose, visible leadership commitment, and room to grow.
Leadership commitment
A team cannot build an asset management system alone. Leaders must sponsor it, protect its time, and use its output in real decisions. Without that, the team becomes a reporting office, and reports nobody reads are a cost, not a capability.
Related
- What is asset management?
- Building an Asset Management Team (free PDF available)
Sources and further reading
- Ruth Wallsgrove and Lou Cripps, Building an Asset Management Team (2020). PDF (proceeds donated): https://talkinginfrastructure.com/resources/
- Lou Cripps, "Building an Asset Management Team", FTA Multimodal TAM Roundtable, 2019. https://www.transit.dot.gov/TAM/SGRroundtables/2019MM/RTD_BuildingTeam
- Lou Cripps, "Leadership Commitment", TRB Conference on Transportation Asset Management, 2023.