Asset management approaches: from strategic goals to asset plans – a Scottish Water water main example

Asset management organisations are increasingly required to make consistent, transparent, and aligned decisions. It is challenging because of the many different decisions that are made across these organisations by the many different people who are involved in making the decisions. It is particularly challenging to align high-level strategic decisions with lower-level system or project-specific decisions. Useful tools to do this, although, are asset management approaches (AMAs), that is, documents that explain when interventions are to be executed on average to provide the best value for money and which interventions to accelerate or postpone if desired to achieve the goals of an organisation. Although they are in use in some way in some organisations now, there has not yet been an explicit proposal for the content of AMAs. This paper does this. It positions AMAs between the highest-level decision making of the organisation, that is, which strategic investments should be made, and the day-to-day decision making of the organisation. This includes the policy or ruleset to follow and to be applied at a system level, which projects to consider for delivery based on that ruleset, and which blend of interventions across portfolios to finance.