Case study 4.3

Asset management for public entities: Learning from local government examples.

Organisation C – Planning not up to date means there is little rationale for programmes of work

This organisation does not have a corporate asset management policy to define its approach, and the role of asset management in the wider planning of the entity. Nor, in the absence of a policy, does it have a co-ordinated approach to asset management planning across its activities. As a result, its planning is haphazard and is updated at different times, to different standards, using differing assumptions. In turn, this makes it difficult for decisions on budget priorities to reflect the varied needs of the organisation's various assets.

We found that some of this organisation’s services were not supported by up-to-date plans. One service area had not fundamentally updated its planning since 2001. It still had text looking forward to a long-term analysis of work programmes that "would" be needed over a 10-year period that was just about to end. This analysis was nearly a decade old and it is clear that, although financial forecasts had been updated, the plan’s content, and therefore the basis for the financial forecasts, had not. The planning pre-dated the Local Government Act's requirement for community outcomes, contained obsolete information about the assets, and had no lifecycle asset management plan to justify planned works.