Beyond Best Practice Asset Management - Next Practice Approaches to Practitioner-Academic Dialogue

Public infrastructure is essential to community development and prosperity. Changing social, economic and environmental conditions challenge the effective delivery of these assets, requiring greater strategic direction in... [ view full abstract ]

Public infrastructure is essential to community development and prosperity. Changing social, economic and environmental conditions challenge the effective delivery of these assets, requiring greater strategic direction in commissioning, maintenance and management.

Research Question: How can academic and practitioners come together to achieve improved strategic management of public sector assets? Such an approach requires considering community future needs and desires as expressed in strategic vision and organisational objectives and, alignment with internal policy, procedures and resources to deliver services through assets.

Conceptual Foundation: Working with public organisations to meet community and service needs currently and into the future, we report on three industry-engaged research projects grounded in practice.  The research was brokered through a non-profit third party leading to innovative co-created processes in asset management.  

Significance: Aimed at identifying maturity levels of current asset management systems, processes and practices) and assessing how participating organisations develop a Strategic Asset Management approach to move ‘beyond best practice’ asset management to next practice asset management.

Methodology: Two tools (Asset Management Capability Maturity Model and Policy Delphi) were implemented to (a) generate baseline data; (b) attain agreement about the strategic direction for asset management and possible  future action.  

Results: Paper reports on outcomes relating to processes and the co-produced policy and practice adjustments.

Relevance to panel: This paper explores and examines viable and innovative pathways practitioners and academics can work together using facilitative tools to co-create new policy and management practices. The focus is to enhance public value, increase the evidence base for adopting asset management approaches and demonstrate the utility of 3^rd party brokered dialogue.