If you do not have CEO and senior leadership real commitment to Asset Management, even the best AM team cannot succeed.

Even with this commitment, getting the right person to lead on Asset Management appears to us to be the single most critical action they need to take.

Unfortunately, you can get it wrong, and people can get damaged in the process. It almost feels like a one-shot deal: if someone takes it in the wrong direction, it can taint the term Asset Management and put people off in future.

If everyone doesn’t really know what it means, but they are sold a line by, for example, a consultant who doesn’t know either, they won’t look beyond that misunderstanding if it doesn’t seem to work. Real examples include organizations who decided Asset Management is an implementation of work management IT, a.k.a. an ‘Enterprise Management System’; or that it equates to reliability-centered maintenance (RCM). Both are very useful tools, but they aren’t a transformation of the business in themselves, and can be expensive, painful and applied wrongly.

Asset Management is about people, relationships, assets and strategies. You need a leader that has some knowledge of each. Leadership is a skillset beyond technical knowledge or management proficiencies. So it is worth careful thought about who can deliver this to the organization.