Capt. Colby Gregory, Asset Management Instructor within AFIT’s Civil Engineer School wrote an article titled “AMPs ripe for innovation” published in the Air Force Civil Engineer Magazine, Vol. 25 No. 2, Summer 2017.

Below is an excerpt from the article.  The full article can be read on page 28 here.

It’s no secret that in today’s Air Force, engineers have to innovate. More than ever, the Air Force’s mission depends on our ability to provide and sustain facilities and infrastructure.

For the last 10 years, activity management plans, or AMPs, have been the vehicle to implement asset management across the enterprise. Unfortunately, AMP management isn’t as simple as “fix the broken stuff”: It is a more organized approach to decision-making and requires a comprehensive understanding of how our organization extracts value from its assets.

In this journey toward AMP management, engineers have learned much about what our inventory and how diverse each mission set is. As such, there is no coloring book, no instructional guide to AMP management. We have sustainment management system, or SMS, tools and other Nex-Gen IT systems designed to inform and assist in populating our AMPs, but on what is an AMP manager really supposed to focus?

Program Action Directive 12-03 is a common reference guide for many, but what does it say specifically about AMP management? Turns out it says a lot; pages and pages of text define the roles and responsibilities of AMP and sub-AMP managers. These roles and responsibilities can be distilled down to four interrelated concepts that rely heavily on innovation to be successful: data, requirements, planning and performance.

Activity management planning is intended to provide the ability to advocate for, and support the allocation of, resources. It is fueled by data. But what data do we need?

Data, similar to the airfields that enable our mission, should be treated as an asset. What data do we need and how do we extract value from it?

The data we need can be boiled down to two categories: inventory and attribute data. Inventory data doesn’t change over time; attribute data does. A building will always have a single construction date, a relatively stagnant size (unless we reconfigure it), category code and other important inventory elements. On the other hand, condition and age are two examples of attribute data that changes as a function of time. Once we have a grasp of the kinds of data that will provide us value, we can start to combine data points, which leads us to the second concept of AMP management: requirements.

What is a requirement? It’s easy to think of a requirement as simply a project, but requirements are so much more than that. The utilities activity has a requirement to provide potable water to users across the installation. The transportation networks and airfield pavements activity has a requirement to provide pavement to the mission and users of the roads on base. Requirements should aim to provide an acceptable level of service, enabling our organization to realize value from its assets.

We use projects to fulfill requirements, but sometimes we meet them through preventive and corrective maintenance. The more data we have, the more we understand about our portfolios. The more we understand our portfolios, the more requirements appear. This quickly exceeds our capacity, so how do we keep up with requirements over time? That’s where the third concept of AMP management comes into play: planning.

Remember, the “P” in AMP is “plan” or “planning.” Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower once said “Plans are nothing. Planning is everything.” In the context of activity management planning, this could not be truer. An AMP does not need to be a spiral-bound product we put on our shelves and consult twice per year. We need to use the tools at our disposal to look into the future and identify the requirements necessary to support the mission.

SMS tools can help make this task simple. The data we feed SMS is pivotal in providing us the information we need to plan for requirements. Some of these requirements will be met in the form of a balanced preventive maintenance program, corrective maintenance actions and maybe a project or two. Ultimately, it’s on the AMP manager to interpret the data and provide recommendations on how to best meet the requirements. The end result of meeting requirements is both effective and efficient mission support. So how do we measure our effectiveness and efficiency toward this end? That’s where the fourth concept becomes crystal clear: performance.

Performance is a tricky subject, because what performs well from one perspective may perform poorly from another. An ice-cold room on a hot day might perform well for its occupants, but consumes a lot more energy than necessary. To date, there are very few well-established key performance indicators published for AMP managers to follow. Having an understanding of how our organization extracts value from its assets will allow us to define what constitutes “good” and “bad” performance.

This is where innovation is most crucial. AMP managers must innovate ways that work best for their individual installation to not only measure, but communicate performance to stakeholders and decision-makers alike. For instance, if all we care about is mitigating risk, we can use condition and criticality to communicate it. Both of these attributes can be extrapolated from SMS and we can plot them on a chart to communicate where we are taking our greatest risk. This provides us direction on where resources should be focused to improve risk performance.

Ultimately, AMP management today is equal parts art and science. There is little guidance out there on exactly what an AMP manager should be doing, and that can be frustrating. The silver lining, however, is that the lack of specific guidance provides an opportunity to innovate. We can change the way the rest of the installation and the Air Force looks at how activities support our various mission sets, and how assets support those activities. The more we can tie what we do back to Air Force core functions, the more effective and efficient we will be. To get there, we must innovate!