Iowa Department of Transportation Asset Management Technical Support
Iowa Department of Transportation Asset Management Technical Support
Iowa Department of Transportation approached us in 2015 to help prepare the department’s first Transportation Asset Management Plan. The plan will guide the agency’s decisions for managing its pavements and bridges during the next 10 years.
“Iowa DOT did not want to ‘reinvent the wheel’,” our Asset Management Program Manager Joe Guerre said. “And while we applied best practices gleaned from our experience with agencies around the country, Iowa’s custom TAMP does more than comply with federal regulations. It’s helping the department do more with less and minimize long-term ownership costs. It accomplishes this by giving the agency’s leaders the information needed to make tough decisions about how to allocate available funds."
Iowa’s TAMP is based on data that was already collected regularly by the DOT. We helped the department’s staff better incorporate these data into their asset management process. The resulting TAMP summarizes current conditions and describes how these conditions are expected to change during the next decade. It also provides a financial plan for maintaining assets in a state of good repair across the state.
Our approach combined our extensive asset management experience with our knowledge of highway design and maintenance. It also leveraged our depth of economic analysis and risk management capabilities.
The latter helped the DOT address one of its main challenges: how to incorporate risk into its asset management process. We developed a process and facilitated internal workshops that led to a robust risk management plan. Now in place, the plan is helping the agency attain its goals by proactively mitigating risks that could impede their achievement.
We worked with DOT staff across the state. Our role included that of liaison within the agency, collecting input from the executive team, asset owners, financial analysts, engineers and planners. We combined their individual inputs into a continuous story, which led to a unified vision for future asset management enhancements.