Operations & Maintenance

Dave Brailsford may not be a name that is well known in the asset management world but if you’re a cyclist, you might very well know the impact he made in the sport of elite competitive cycling.  As the coach of the  Great Britain Cycling Team, Dave elevated the team from mediocrity to excellence during the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Here, they won 60% of all the gold medals available. The team continued its domination of the sport for the following 10 years. 

But what was the difference between Brailsford and the team’s previous coaches? 

“The whole principle came from the idea that if you broke down everything you could think of that goes into riding a bike, and then improve it by 1%, you will get a significant increase when you put them all together.” – Dave Brailsford in an interview with Matt Slater, BBC Sport

Brailsford did the equivalent of what an asset manager would do by deconstructing the asset strategy.  First, he considered the current state of the team and the equipment and information that was already in place. Then, starting from where the team was at, he implemented a recursive process of continual improvement. The significant aspects of equipment, maintenance and modifications included: 

• Redesign of the seat to make them more comfortable
• Rubbed alcohol on the tires for better grip
• Riders wore heated over shorts to maintain ideal muscle temperatures
• Utilized biofeedback sensors to monitor how athletes responded to training
• Tested fabrics in a wind tunnel and switched racing suits
• Massage gels to improve muscle activation and recovery
• Hired a surgeon to teach riders how to wash their hands to avoid catching cold
• Determined the best pillow and mattress to optimize sleep for each rider 
   

Does This Sound Familiar? 

Many asset managers will recognize that it doesn’t require a prolonged digital transformation event or an expensive improvement project to improve asset management performance significantly.  The objective being to improve performance at the lowest sustainable cost, while keeping an eye on risk. A cross-functional team is brought together for this and to spend time developing the asset strategy.  At the end of this collaboration, like the British cycling team, they will come up with a list of strategy actions including some re-design, time-based and condition-based activities that, when done well, achieve improvements in opportunity, cost, risk and performance. 

Then What? 

The Dave Brailsford story wouldn’t have been told if the focus was on the strategy and how it was developed.  The story became known for the execution and monitoring of the strategy.  Brailsford leveraged the aggregation of marginal gains, and he was relentless when it came to monitoring for effectiveness, watching for emerging threats, and continually incorporating hundreds of small additional improvements over time. In asset management, more attention and effort go into developing the asset strategy with little left over to make sure it is operationalized. Asset managers can take a page from Brailsford’s book by looking at the simplest aspects of what needs to be changed and leveraging efforts that have already been made. 

“We convince ourselves that massive success requires massive action.” – James Clear, Atomic Habits

As an asset management professional, you break down everything that goes into preserving the function and reliability of a critical asset. The question to ask yourself is: Have you moved beyond the ‘development’ of the asset strategy and ‘actualized’ all the little things that, in aggregate, generate significant business value?  Answering this question requires one to think of the needle that needs to be moved and the successive improvements, that when compounded over time, move that needle significantly. 

Learn how you can operationalize the efforts you’ve invested in your asset strategies by connecting with us here.