Jeffrey Plant is an accomplished infrastructure delivery professional with extensive transportation, environmental, and building project experience for clients. Mr. Plant has honed his scheduling, negotiating, and dispute resolution skills on hundreds of projects by reviewing claims, analyzing positions, preparing expert reports, and participating in settlement meetings on multiple change orders and claims issues.

Andy Pratt is a skilled program/project manager with particular expertise in managing the Project Management Office’s (PMO) and streamlined business processes. His industry background includes heavy highway/civil, power substation, power and gas transmission, and distribution clients. He has coordinated activities, resources, equipment, and information necessary for project completion.

Essential Requirements for Managing an Infrastructure Capital Assets Program

Managing the condition of aging infrastructure requires a good grasp of the condition of the infrastructure assets and the budgets to maintain them. A systematic capital asset management program to inspect and evaluate the condition of various assets is essential. Planning, repair, routine maintenance, rehabilitation, or replacement strategies based on those inspections and subsequent analyses must follow.

To do this effectively, we need a basic understanding of the deterioration of assets over time. It looks a little bit like an inverted curve. In the first five to ten years, you get very little deterioration. In the next ten years, however, the deterioration accelerates, and then, at a certain point, it just falls off the curve, and the asset’s residual life becomes very small.

Lifecycle management of assets, from planning to disposal, must be at the top of an agency’s agenda to achieve long-term economic accountability for current and future users before assets show irreversible effects. Significant economic gains accrue when a program is properly executed while neglecting a program leads to exponentially increasing costs and risks over time. Monitoring and reporting mechanisms, like dashboards and KPIs, should be created to ensure that the program is effective and efficient.

The Impact of Funding on Infrastructure Asset Management

Most transportation authorities in North America use infrastructure management systems to apprise them of the condition of their structures without sufficient budget to deal with these deficiencies. Typically, maintenance budgets for infrastructure management are cut because they are not considered a flashy or politically advantageous use of funds. The classic conflict with infrastructure asset management has been finding a way to get funding for these repairs and improvements that are not considered extravagant or exciting to the average citizen.

The passing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) in November of 2021 is expected to be a welcome relief for these funding issues. The act is seen by those with long-term experience in the industry as a rare investment in transportation, climate change mitigation, clean water, and internet access. Read more about the act and its anticipated effects on the industry here.

Managing Assets with the P3 Model

The P3 model has changed how certain assets are managed because, due to the nature of the model, the company that takes on concession responsibility typically must hand back the asset somewhere between 30-50 years in “like new” condition. This means that the company responsible for handing back this asset must be efficient in managing and maintaining the asset for that period so that it doesn’t have to be rebuilt soon after. If the company keeps it in “like new” condition continuously through the period they are managing it. It is the most effective lifecycle strategy.

The P3 model has forced concessionaires to be proactive about asset management. Some of the more interesting asset management systems currently are on P3 projects. While we haven’t seen many assets handed back using the P3 model, some of the earlier P3 projects that started 30 years ago are coming close to the stage where they will be handed back. It will be telling to see how effective that process is.

Using Technology for Infrastructure Asset Management

Agencies will handle their asset management differently, depending on the type of assets they are responsible for. For example, many highway authorities use pavement management systems for annual measurement. They use sophisticated authenticated vehicles to judge the general condition and roughness of pavements. Based on these results, they set their priorities. They could require maintenance, which could be minor such as crack-sealing or pavement overlays. Major maintenance would include milling and resurfacing large pavement areas and, in some cases, complete pavement reconstruction.

A handful of companies in North America specialize in pavement management and have specialized equipment that uses a combination of lasers, accelerometers, and video cameras to record the condition of pavements. These processes are well established and typically highly successful.

Asset management systems also exist in buildings. Real estate developers are skilled at implementing asset management systems for buildings where they manage leases and leasehold improvements. Due to the evolving nature of these buildings, as tenants come and go, they often need to deal with new fit-ups and fit-outs. These developers use sophisticated software for this asset management.

School boards and universities utilize these systems at differing levels of advancement. A large university with billions of dollars of real estate assets will have an asset management system in place, and it will need to be updated regularly so that there is constant knowledge of the condition of each building.

The oil and gas sector has advanced tools to monitor its assets, particularly oil refineries, as does the metals and minerals sector. It would be difficult, for example, to take down a blast furnace for maintenance without having every minute programmed by a sophisticated system.

Currently, some US state DOTs are placing sensors on bridge assets. Using regression analysis, the agencies can generate a prediction model that looks at environmental conditions and temperature gradients and compares them across other target bridges. The results are pulled together in a dashboard, allowing the agencies to monitor and determine the most suitable time for Infrared Thermography (IRT).

Other technology capabilities for infrastructure asset management are monitoring structure settlement, support of excavations, deformation, vibration, and air quality. An air system can continuously check for alarm conditions in real-time and monitor unwanted trends that trigger notifications in a predetermined setting.

The Role of Dashboards & KPIs in Infrastructure Construction Management

PMA has extensive experience in the construction management and project controls fields. One of the unique ways we benefit clients looking for assistance with capital asset management is by implementing dashboards and KPIs. The dashboards and KPIs show essential data to help clients build using information from their existing management systems. If a client has many assets with years of historical information, a more usable or readable format to view this information will benefit clients. Additionally, it provides the opportunity to build artificial intelligence algorithms that could predict the deterioration of a client’s assets.

With Geographic Information Systems (GIS), State DOTs, Federal Highway Administration (FWHA), and metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs) can create online geospatial dashboards and KPIs to monitor and accomplish strategic goals to gather raw data. This data can then be processed into information and used for real-time decision making.

A Clear Road Ahead

The capacity to monitor, predict, and extend the lifecycle of our infrastructure has never been more efficient or precise than it is today. With the passing of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, the necessary funding for implementing the innovations described above will become more available. The funding will help support the continued and expanded use of technology, dashboards, and KPIs to ensure that public entities are more aware of the condition of their assets and can address any shortcomings or deficiencies with a sense of increased urgency.

Bruce Stephan is a nationally recognized licensed civil engineer with extensive experience on complex medium, large, and mega engineering and construction projects. His distinguished career spans public service, general contracting, and consulting nationally and internationally. He remains actively involved in managing construction programs.

What is the difference between infrastructure management and construction management?

While construction management is essential for infrastructure projects, infrastructure management focuses on capital asset management and program and project funding. A significant difference in public works is the tendency to have more claims due to a low-bid environment. Infrastructure construction tends to be more horizontal and generally involves roads, bridges, tunnels, subways, water, and other utilities.

Public projects are exciting and challenging due to multiple agency interactions, their importance and impact on the general population, and the need to maintain existing services while renovating aging infrastructure.

What are the biggest challenges of infrastructure project management?

The biggest challenge is indecisiveness. On public works projects, numerous stakeholders are involved, and each must make many decisions that affect the project. On design-build projects, decision-making is even more intense since the contractor does the design and needs to resolve issues quickly.

When a project is in construction, change orders occur, and the owner has to decide if a change will be accepted. Those decisions often involve many people, and lengthy decision-making can cause a project to linger for years. Private projects don’t seem to encounter those same issues or suffer from these types of delays.

Scope creep is the second biggest problem. Not locking down design and finalizing cost estimates are significant causes of project delays and cost overruns.

How can we improve infrastructure project management efficiency?

Simply stated, put processes, procedures, and software in place that get information to decision-makers as early as possible. I recommend enforcing procedures using ISO 9000 concepts. ISO 9000 requires a compliance mechanism that ensures procedures are followed. Ongoing oversight identifies non-compliance and corrective action is implemented at the program level when staff aren’t observing procedures.

I’ve seen this work on an infrastructure program in the Bay Area. The client had project management software in place for agency senior managers that identified when procedures were not being followed. Using data and procedures to hold construction managers accountable made a significant difference in identifying cost and schedule issues in time to avoid them. It not only kept us all on our toes, but we felt good knowing that the data we were providing was being reviewed and used to achieve success. That program won several Engineering News-Record and CMAA Project of the Year Awards and is an excellent example of successful procedure implementation.

How do we benchmark for better performance?

Just asking this question gets an agency halfway there. You get better performance by capturing and publishing benchmark data that allows decision-makers to take action. Step 1 is to determine what metrics to track.

Several crucial construction project benchmarks include gauging how close construction cost estimates come to actual bid prices and how well a schedule is doing against the baseline. I worked for a large agency that tracked timely design completion due to its impact on construction start. Tracking turnaround times for submittals, RFIs, and change orders is also common.

Earned value management (EVM) is essential since it unites two critical factors in project success—time and cost. EVM allows project stakeholders to compare project performance against the project baseline. Most importantly, EVM makes possible a realistic forecast using current trends. Identifying problems is as important as crafting a plan to address them. The best benchmarking plan is a plan that has a mechanism for solving problems.

What benchmarks or KPIs are most important?

The most critical benchmark is safety. You want to ensure that on your project, no one gets hurt; no one dies. Quality is the next most crucial benchmark since an owner has to live with the project results. No one wants a shoddy end project. The basics include quality nonconformances, time to implement corrective action, timeliness of preparing daily reports, number of inspectors per progress billings, etc.

The Army Corps of Engineers uses a three-part inspection program as a quality benchmark that’s designed to avoid problems when a new definable portion of the work begins. The program tracks essential metrics like adequate submittals, RFIs, and proper materials before new work proceeds; meetings and meeting minutes; and any changes in the number of quality issues.

How do infrastructure improvement projects benefit communities?

Infrastructure projects are great because you see noticeable results as the project is built. By way of example, we recently completed a Rapid Transit project in Albuquerque, New Mexico, that helped reduce the time passengers spend on the bus.

The project involved a section of Route 66, the famous one from the song. The section through downtown was run down and had vacant buildings. The ancillary scope of fixing up sidewalks, adding landscaping, striping intersections, and building safety features resulted in attracting private development along the route. That project improved both downtown and an iconic road in America by investing public funds on a bus line.

Regarding equity, San Francisco Public Utilities Commission (SFPUC) created a Community Benefits Program that requires its consultants to do things for the community that involve small business goals and goals that benefit the community. Using this model, the dollars invested in infrastructure literally spawn benefits that multiply the value of the project many times over.

How is PMA the preeminent firm to lead infrastructure project management projects nationally?

PMA senior leaders are actively engaged in projects and provide practical real-world solutions. In fact, most of our leaders have been with PMA more than 20 years, a consistency that clients prefer. We bring lessons learned to projects from people who’ve been, and are, in the trenches. We have innovative software, processes, procedures, and ideas that help construction owners complete projects on time and within budget.

In addition to our deep bench of experience and innovative software, we are dedicated to improving project delivery. PMA’s NetPoint software can turn a complex schedule into a graphical, logic-based schedule understandable to anyone.

Our work with agencies like the Federal Transit Administration and the General Services Administration has provided an understanding of their funding partners, needs, and requirements. This is a significant benefit to our clients. We make sure they’re successfully navigating those challenges that, often, do not fall into their area of expertise.

Most importantly, PMA has built a strong reputation in its 50 years of being in business. We are a midsize firm with skilled staff who prove themselves every day. When we walk into a project, we need to be seen as the most competent faces in the room, ready to impress, because we are often engaged on troubled projects when an owner needs assistance fixing an issue where other firms have failed. The company is widely recognized as having detail-oriented analytical staff and leaders who excel at identifying and resolving impediments to project success. As employees, we are transparent, honest, and relationship oriented. Rather than focus on money or being bigger than other firms, PMA is all about client service.