• Novice
  • Aware
  • Competent

Appropriate Skills

This topic has a brief overview, below, and covers:

Organizations need to match the skill levels and expertise to the roles and responsibilities expected of their staff at different corporate levels.

The roles and responsibilities should equate to the:

  • Value of the assets involved
  • Amount of work involved such as the value of the renewal works or the age of the assets, operations and maintenance expenditure values. This will differ radically between dynamic and passive asset groups and also between like divisions and regions within the organization.

Asset Management positions include:

  • Workplace level
  • Facility level
  • Business unit level. (e.g. Maintenance, Engineering Design etc .)
  • Corporate Management level.

Asset Management Skill Sets

The basic principles of asset management need to be understood by all staff whose activities influence how the assets are managed.

Specialist skills need to be developed in technical staff at all levels of the organization.

Basic principles of asset management

  • Physical attributes
  • Condition records
  • Inventory systems
  • Individuality of assets
  • Classification of assets
  • Asset numbering systems.

Specialist asset management skills

  • Information systems
  • Risk management
  • Condition assessment
  • Failure modes
  • Predictive, modeling of failures
  • Maintenance analysis
  • Maintenance management
  • Operations efficiency
  • Asset management review / auditing
  • Life cycle functional relationships
  • Performance monitoring
  • Relationship between spatial and textural data
  • Asset economics and accounting
  • Asset liabilities
  • Renewal / life extension decision processes.

Common Skills Weaknesses

Organizations often lack skills in:

  • Understanding of Life Cycle Asset Management techniques
  • Application of Risk Management and Infrastructure Economics to ensure optimized renewal decision making
  • Advanced maintenance management and the justification of maintenance budgets including appropriate condition monitoring budgets
  • The commercial ability to manage adversary contracts for maintenance and minor and major renewal works.

The degree to which an organization is affected by these weaknesses often depends on the priority and degree of assimilation of asset management activities into their standard operating environment and culture.

When an organization has a culture that accepts asset management as an integrated business process, the areas of weakness will diminish.

Addressing Skills Shortages

Where an organization has a shortage of skills, a number of options are available:

  • Retrain existing staff
  • Retrain staff from other divisions
  • Appoint experienced and qualified staff from outside the organization
  • Use contracted consultants.

The advantages of using existing staff are that they:

  • Learn faster, as they already know the organization
  • Understand the organization's assets
  • Understand the structure and culture of the organization
  • May have overall skills and experience that would set them above externally appointed staff with specialist qualifications.

Appropriate Resources

The number of staff needed to effectively manage an organization's infrastructure is a frequently debated issue. Some of the factors to consider are:

  • Criticality of the asset to the organization's ability to deliver the desired level of service
  • Age and condition of assets
  • Location of the assets, e.g. more staff will be necessary if the assets are dispersed
  • Effectiveness of asset management
  • Automated Information Technology systems, e.g. SCADA, remote monitoring etc

Historical staffing levels are often used as an input to determining current and future requirements.

However as assets age, failures will start to become more frequent, and more information on the assets will be required to make appropriate operations, maintenance and renewal decisions. Benchmarking against other similar organizations can help.

The steps to determine the number of staff should include:

  • Determine an appropriate organizational structure
  • Consider historical staffing level against the following aspects and make adjustments for these factors:
    • Ability to deliver the desired results
    • The age of the assets
    • The condition of the assets
    • Improvements in technology in monitoring asset condition
    • Change in the size of the asset base
    • Changes in corporate goals and service delivery levels.
  • Assessthe location of staff and of assets, eg travel time to assess and monitor unmanned plant
  • Estimate the time and frequency for specific tasks for each of the roles
  • Consider the maturity of the organization's asset management program, ie the amount and detail of the data currently required, compared to when the program is fully implemented and producing the desired results
  • Identify the implications on the current level of skill and experience of existing asset management staff, e.g. it may take 1.5 equivalent staff to complete a particular role, but with more experience the role might be reduced to 1
  • Are staffing levels in line with the goals of the organization's asset management strategic plan?

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