Sidonie Eccles-Kita
Sidonie Eccles-Kita Community Director Phone: + 61 2 9955 7400 Mobile: + 61 466 553 344
stephanie.sandbrook@theeventfulgroup.com
Debra Burgio
Debra Burgio Speaker & Partner Engagement Manager Phone: + 61 2 9955 7400 Mobile: +61 413 997 876
Risk Management is Boring: Brain Hacks to Protect Your Business
One challenge for many businesses is the wonderfully unsexy world of risk management. Due to the overwhelming optimism of entrepreneurs, stopping the bad things happening can often be overlooked. However, when you let people rip you off, exploit your weaknesses or you just leave a small door open to be manipulated, it can be fatal, says Daniel Murray CEO of Empathic Consulting. Daniel gave the keynote address to over 400 people at Mainstream Conference 2019 in Melbourne, demonstrating the incredible power that empathy has to build business relationships in our digitally focused but disconnected age. In this article he gives us a different way to look at risk management and shares some ways to encourage people to engage their “moral compass” in order to self-regulate risk. It Turns Out We’re All Cheaters There were a number of interesting experiments conducted by professor Dan Ariely from MIT regarding cheating. They asked people to complete a challenging test, then they give them the answers to self-mark their effort, walk to the front of the room and shred their paper before telling the administrator the number of correct answers they correctly answered. They then receive payment for each correct answer. So, do people cheat? What was interesting was not that some people cheated, but that all people consistently cheated. Ariely had tampered with the shredder so they could check and indeed, almost all people cheated, not by a lot, but on average they increased the number of correct answers from 3 to 4 … Continue reading →
Mainstream Conference 2019 Highlights
2019 has been an exciting year for asset management. Technology implementations have hit their stride with many companies successfully striking the balance between human effort and technological innovations. Strategy is being underpinned by a strong asset management mindset, elevating the important work we do to the board level. And it’s all being tied together by the human element. As ever, without alignment of our people, nothing will cut through. These were some key themes we heard during the presentations at this year’s Mainstream Conference, a unique event for maintenance, reliability and asset management professionals. The annual event, which has been running for 24 years, brought together over 400 asset management professionals from 140 companies to hear the latest in asset management strategy, innovation and technology. Here is a summary of key themes and session highlights from Mainstream Conference 2019. Strategy Goes Deeper than Asset Management Our Mainstream community were eager to hear how companies are fostering an Asset Management mindset within their organisations and aligning this with their overall company objectives. We heard from several leaders in this area who shared their strategies for transformation. Anna Wiley, BHP’s Head of Asset Management, gave us a view inside their global Maintenance Centre of Excellence (MCoE), an initiative which has successfully moved BHP from 40 separate maintenance organisations to one globally connected community. “The MCoE represents a fundamentally new approach to maintenance for BHP,” Anna said. The emphasis has been on concentrating efforts, applying standardised and repeatable processes, employing mathematical and data … Continue reading →
AGL’s Energy Efficiency Journey: Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast
AGL were unknowingly losing $20m per year on fuel costs by operating with many feedwater heaters out of service. For years individuals had attempted to get them back into service because they felt it was the right thing to do. But consistency brewed complacency. AGL used human-centred design techniques to identify the root cause – we’re not talking technical root cause, rather behavioural root cause. Then they started on an ambitious journey to change the culture. Sarah Hannah, Head of Asset Systems (Acting) at AGL Energy will be outlining the astonishing results achieved in her session at Mainstream Conference 2019. Here she tells us why you should be focusing on culture transformation instead of initiatives, and outlines how they have engaged AGLs leadership to come on their transformation journey. Why Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast How many initiatives have we seen started in our companies which seemingly evaporate with no real value delivered. As asset management professionals, we are continually delivering initiatives to improve our asset management systems, our asset performance, our maintenance strategies… the list goes on. How much of the time that we spend delivering these initiatives do we focus on ‘how’ we are delivering rather than ‘what’ we are delivering? And do we know ‘why’ we are delivering it? “People are our most important asset and bringing them along on the asset management journey is not an option, it’s essential.” The phrase ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ talks to the fact that if you aren’t identifying the … Continue reading →
Realising the Benefits of Asset Optimisation
The field of asset management and asset investment has moved into the spotlight. No longer on the fringes of business awareness, it has become a top strategic objective for organisations of all sizes. A key driver of this change is the spreading belief that optimising asset investment plans will deliver tangible benefits to organisations as well as the adoption of ISO 55000 across the globe. However, these drivers also create the challenge of living up to expectations as new, risk-based asset management practices are implemented and then supporting technologies to achieve the standards. Companies can meet that challenge by forecasting two futures, one based on how the organisation used to make decisions, and one based on the principles of advanced asset management. Push Toward ISO 55000 Compliance ISO 55000 stakes out two primary areas of benefit, financial performance and stakeholder value. Some of these benefits have direct dollar impacts, while others such as reputation and social responsibility are harder to quantify, though they clearly link to asset management activities. Most of the benefits are reliant on the hypothesis that an organisation can make better decisions by using risk as the basis for optimisation. This includes balancing short- and long-term goals, managing risk, improving sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness. All these benefits require an investment in process, data and software. The list of benefits from ISO 55000 may be long and seem obvious to asset managers, but eventually the investment in processes, people and technology will have to be justified to executives … Continue reading →
Sydney Water’s Data Strategy Makes the Insights Flow
For Sydney Water’s five million customers, quality and satisfaction can simply mean pouring a clean glass of drinking water. But behind this seemingly basic concept, there’s a complex network of assets that are all underpinned by one thing: Data. Ahead of her session at Mainstream Conference, Tammy Falconer, Head of Asset Knowledge at Sydney Water, outlines the key steps they have taken to build a trusted data strategy and the benefits that are flowing onto their valued customers. Drowning in Data? Not at Sydney Water It’s easy to take for granted that Sydney-siders have access to some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, and that our wastewater disappears, just like that. Behind the scenes, there’s a huge number of assets delivering these services. We’ve been building and maintaining these assets for over 130 years to help make Sydney a liveable city and we’re passionate and proud of our role in shaping the lifestyle of Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra for generations to come. With a long history, our older assets can provide unique challenges, particularly our underground assets where we don’t have easy access to the asset to verify the accuracy of the data. We need to take a targeted and cost-effective approach to improve the data quality of existing assets and at the same time ensure that any new data meets the standards we require. Focusing on Data Foundations We’ve taken a business capability approach to maximising the value of our data focusing on … Continue reading →
7 Habits Of Highly Successful Losers
At the last Olympic Games, just over 92% of the 10,960 athletes who took part did not win a medal. Except for the odd draw, every time two sporting teams meet, one will lose. Thousands of books and articles are written about how to win, yet seemingly none on losing. Strange when one considers how regularly losing happens. As a recent World T20 loser, Paddy Upton knows a thing or two about losing, and he’s not afraid to admit it. Paddy is a world-leading expert in human performance and an international cricket coach. His disruptive leadership approach propelled the Indian team to become World Test Cricket Champions in 2010 and to win the 2011 ICC World Cup. But it hasn’t been all gold medals and triumph along the way. His view is that losing, and more importantly losing successfully, is an important part of building a winning culture. Ahead of his session at Mainstream Conference 2019, he shares seven traits that highly successful losers have in common, and how you can use these as a springboard for success. Successful Losing As a recent World T20 loser, I thought I’d write about losing successfully. Not so that we can become good losers or better at losing, but so that we can optimise losing as a springboard out of the disappointment and back towards success. Let’s start by looking at what effective losing is NOT. It is not acting pissed off, walking around kicking things or throwing your bat when you come … Continue reading →
What’s Next for Asset Management? Key Innovation Themes for 2019
In preparation for Mainstream Conference in August 2019, we’ve just returned from running our annual roundtable discussion groups across Australia. Each session was a full and frank discussion, focusing on the current challenges facing asset management leaders and the enablers leading towards change. We had a fantastic turnout to these roundtables, with over 100 asset management professionals weighing in on the discussions in order to uncover pain points, challenges and ideas for improvement. Three main themes emerged from the research. You can download the full report here for more detail. 1. Digitising Your Asset Management Collecting data for the sake of data is of little value. Understanding the decisions that the data and subsequent analysis will inform is critical to a value-driven data strategy. The magic happens when the data you collect allows you to make decisions that have a tangible impact on your business objectives, often through improved reliability, availability or cost efficiency. If two ground rules are to be followed they seem to be: Understand why (you are collecting); and what (you will do with it). Start with the end in mind and have governance in place before you start the journey. 2. Adopting an Asset Management Mindset Asset Management involves managing the lifespan of a physical assets – from idea to design, build, procure, commission, operate, maintain, improve and retire – in order to meet the businesses’ strategic objectives. Needless to say, this separates Asset Management as a discipline or mindset from Maintenance: It is strategic, centered on … Continue reading →
How to Prime Your Mind for Innovative Thinking
Your brain is pretty smart. It’s amazing. If your brain were a person, it would be in both the super-hip and the super-smart crowd. Your brain is designed to make creativity happen, to think innovatively, and to come up with killer ideas. But before you can get to the killer idea part, you need to take a step back and prime your brain for innovative thinking. Think of it like being the pre-work you before you paint a wall (but much easier). You know that if you create the right conditions, the painted wall will look kick arse. Establishing a high-performance environment for your brain will keep the innovation stream clear and the ideas sparking happily. The good news is there are two easy things you can do right now to create the right environment to fuel ideas: 1. Open your eyes to really notice the things around you; and 2. Freshen up your space. 1. Open Your Eyes and Look Up (and Down, Around and Under) The No.1 thing you need to remember with developing great ideas and market leading thinking is: Great things in = great things out. Brilliant chefs, artists, designers, architects, and authors have all known this for years. Every time you open a book, read a report, or connect with new people and have a conversation, you take in new things. The same is true when you go somewhere different or experience something new. You allow in much more information. That helps you to create … Continue reading →