Asset management is a part of our everyday life, whether we recognise it or not. For everyone in the construction sector, it’s certainly an approach or discipline that wraps around all your activities. Andy Watts, director of Asset Wisdom, outlines the upcoming CIOB Academy-affiliated webinar on the subject.
Asset management is all about understanding and planning for the long term, while ensuring the services (or products) you deliver are as fit for today as they will be in the future.
We need to meet the demands placed on our services, and deliver the capacity to satisfy them. Construction, in its broadest sense, is typically how increasing or changing demand is met, whether purely driven by volume, changes in service requirements, quality, or just current trends and styles.
Two of the key success factors in seamlessly delivering good, resilient service, sustainably, is understanding how each phase of the asset lifecycle is managed and the importance of designing and building easily maintainable and operable assets.
Building an understanding of good asset management principles helps everyone engaged in building, operating and maintaining assets. This is as true for the construction sector as all the other large asset-intensive infrastructure.
Under the auspices of the CIOB Academy, our forthcoming webinar will briefly talk about learning as a journey, building knowledge that you can apply in your day-to-day role. It will focus on asset management and its growing impact on the construction sector.
Knitting it all together
Asset management spans such a broad range of capabilities and provides a framework for knitting them together to deliver the right service and outcomes from any organisation.
We’ll look at the core principles of good asset management, how these impact your role and provide robust decision-making when faced with tough choices. Is your driver lower costs, better performance, embedded and improved safety, or the challenge of balancing all three in the optimum way?
Such decisions are not always made well and are often challenged when disaster strikes. Were costs cut that had a safety impact? Was enhanced performance or style put before user safety? By understanding the basics of good asset management, you will make more considered and informed decisions that are aligned to and balanced across your overarching objectives.
Confidently holding discussions in an asset management context does not always come easily as for many. The discipline isn’t their core experience and, to be honest, the subject is often a misunderstood concept. Building your knowledge, even at a high level, across the broad span of asset management activities will give you that confidence, and a better grasp of the terminology and language.
The webinar will close with a look at a few of the really important aspects of asset management that underpin good construction practices and how these impact the lifecycle of the assets. And we’ll consider the importance of information and BIM, as a key deliverable from the construction phase into the ongoing life of the assets.
Finally, what next? How will you continue your learning journey in asset management? What’s available and right for you?
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