1. Get to Know All Your Assets
A typical city contains thousands of assets, from street lamps and manhole covers to park benches and fire hydrants. No matter how big or small your city is, it is important to know the answers to the following questions about all of your assets:
- Where are they located?
- What is their condition?
- Who is assigned to them?
2. Reactive vs. Preventive Maintenance
To maintain or not to maintain… that is the question plaguing most public works departments today. While reactive maintenance is cheaper upfront than preventive maintenance, it may not always be the right choice.
Waiting for an asset to fail before performing maintenance opens your organization up to liability, as well as causes a significant drain on your already tight budget.
Our advice? Stick with preventive maintenance scheduling.
3. Sort Out Your Priorities
Imagine this: Two of your most important assets fail on the same day, but you only have available resources to repair one.
Which would you choose to repair?
You should know the value of any given asset to your organization, and the estimated cost of unavailability if it should fail.
4. Plan for the Future
In the public works industry, there are many times when planning for the future is vital. To effectively plan for the future, you need to keep both the small and the big pictures in mind.
- The Small Picture
For your organization, the small picture might include which projects to find and how your replacement schedules look for different assets. - The Big Picture
When considering the big picture, you need to look at the smallest members of your community: the kids! As everyone knows, children are the future, so your public works department needs to set out to influence them positively.
Projects that improve safety and accessibility, increase education and community awareness, and adopt green initiatives will help children in your community learn, grow, and stay safe well into their adulthood.
5. Go Green
6. Manage Access and Increase Availability
Planning for problems and downtime is crucial to running a modern public works department. These instances range from unforeseen maintenance issues to others as small as failing to document that a wedding in a public park will make the park unavailable for scheduled maintenance.
At any rate, collecting usage metrics, tracking trends, and receiving alerts when conditions of assets change help to manage your assets and increase availability throughout your community.
