Better Decision Making
Business Case Support
Business cases provide you with the why, what, who and how a project or programme will proceed. In New Zealand, “Better Business Cases” is the framework developed by The Treasury to standardise the process and improve the likelihood of achieving project outputs and programme outcomes. The framework is targeted towards public sector investment but can be equally applied to private sector organisations. More and more organisations in New Zealand are adopting Better Business Cases.
We have the experience and access to specialists to lead you through a business case process that is scalable and appropriate for your organisation such as:
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Undertaking investment logic mapping
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Developing strategic assessments
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Undertaking options analysis and selection from a long list to a short list and ultimately a preferred option
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Development of business cases (strategic, programme or project cases)
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Peer review of business cases
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Coaching and mentoring you through the process
Setting Priorities
You can’t afford to do everything. Therefore having an effective prioritisation process is very important. You will have a number of triggers for prioritising, including insufficient budgets for all desired projects, potential budget reductions, and balancing the budget needs across different activities.
Prioritisation is a key component of the overall capital investment process. It is also becoming critically important when considering your maintenance activities and the relationship between renewal and maintenance investment throughout the lifecycle.
An effective prioritisation process will be complex enough to suit the nature of your investment issues, but simple enough to run efficiently over a number of projects or programmes.
Working with you we can help you:
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Develop a framework tailored to your needs
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Identify your investment priorities to deliver your strategic direction and levels of service
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Identify trade-offs across competing investment activities/outcomes
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Set up a transparent and repeatable process that provides you with control over your program
Levels of Service
Levels of service are a key business driver and influence all Asset Management decisions. Setting your core levels of service and identifying what enhanced services your community is willing to pay for is likely to be one of the key questions you consider during your planning cycles.
Understanding how communities describe your services and what they value can provide useful indications to the levels of service that should be provided and setting the performance measures to demonstrate how the organisation is going in relation to delivering levels of service.
We have worked with a number of organisations to:
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Identify the aspects of services that are important to customers
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Define the levels of service the organisation delivers
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Develop effective measures to monitor organisational and asset performance
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Develop a consultation plan
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Utilise the results of the levels of service review process to drive asset decision making
Lifecycle Analysis
Optimising your lifecycle costs from concept through creation, management and disposal is likely to be at the core of the infrastructure services your organisation is providing.
Lifecycle management is the art of maximising the value you get from your assets for the required service level. Assets have simple lives: once created, they immediately start to age, some of them need significant attention when they are young (‘cradle failures’) and as they age further, some assets need more and more maintenance until they deteriorate to a point that they require renewal.
Your goal is to minimise costs over the life cycle! An increasingly sophisticated suite of tools and associated information models need to be utilised to fully understand the various trade-offs such as:
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Costs versus levels of service and risk
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Asset maintenance versus renewal
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Planned versus unplanned maintenance
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Efficient asset utilisation versus providing redundant capacity
Each of these trade-off decisions need to be based on a robust evidential basis, that has been verified, and options evaluated.
There is no one right way of improving your lifecycle management, so talk to us about the right options for you.
Asset Criticality
Knowing which assets are critical, and why, will help you develop the most appropriate levels of service and management strategies, so you can minimise the risk of catastrophic events and achieve an optimum balance between the risk of asset failure and the lifecycle costs of inspecting, maintaining, repairing, and renewing assets. Interruptions can also have serious impacts on some stakeholders (e.g. hospitals, industry), so knowing who those stakeholders are and why they are critical will enable you to put the appropriate risk and relationship management strategies in place.
Adopting a formalised approach will allow you to make decisions around where to focus investment, maintenance and service response. Working together we can:
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Develop a criticality framework for identifying your critical assets and stakeholder
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Develop a criticality management strategy including:
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Shutdown procedures for planned and unplanned shutdowns
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Flagging incidents for rapid response or escalation
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Operational efficiencies for targeting more frequent inspection maintenance or replacement of assets whose consequence of failure is critical
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Identification of appropriate mitigation measures for critical assets (e.g. duplication of systems, routes or assets, and the holding of critical spares)
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Criticality monitoring and planning such as:
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Capturing the criticality of each asset, against its asset number, the geospatial location and contact details of critical stakeholders.
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Developing a renewals program for critical asset replacement before their anticipated failure date.
Risk Management
The Risk Management standard AS/NZS ISO 31000 places increased emphasis on considering your risks in terms of the effect of uncertainty on your objectives, rather than a risk incident itself. It also outlines the 11 guiding principles, a generic management framework, and the process for managing risk in your organisation.
In our experience the most overlooked aspect of risk management is “risk culture” and the crucial role it plays in the execution of risk management in your organisation. It's important that you identify specific levers to actively influence and develop a risk culture, and an approach to measure, benchmark and profile your maturity to effectively support the application of ISO 31000.
Whether establishing a new, or enhancing your existing framework, we can work closely with you and your people to:
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Develop a risk management framework aligned with the industry standard AS/NZS ISO 31000
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Facilitate a 360 degree review of risk across your business, activity or project including internal processes and activities, external factors and relationships, and connections with the broader enterprise
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Develop risk governance and supporting approaches for robust and effective risk management beyond the risk officer
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Develop an approach to measure and profile risk culture, and industry-specific benchmarking
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Develop an approach to support risk-enabled decisions and processes
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Instil a risk culture into your organisation