Need and outcome
Is there a stated outcome this asset is meant to produce, written down separately from a description of the asset itself?
The framework
What to examine, from the first estimate to the asset register.
23 domains across the four stages. Each states the question it settles, what goes wrong when nobody asks it, what to actually examine, and the published requirement or reasoning on which it rests.
Nothing here is invented and nothing is drawn from private methodology. The arrangement, however, is this publication’s own, and where a domain rests on inference rather than on a clause, the page says so in place of the citation.
Why by stage
No standard is arranged this way, and one of them says so explicitly. ISO 55001 states in its introduction that the order in which its requirements are presented does not reflect their importance nor imply the order in which they are to be implemented. It is a management system standard for an organisation, not a route through the life of an asset.
The others stop at their own edges for equally good reasons. ISO 21502 and the PMBOK Guide describe projects, which end. The Global Internal Audit Standards describe an audit function, not an asset. AACE classifies estimates. FIDIC governs a contract. Each is authoritative inside its scope and silent outside it.
The failures this publication examines happen in the silence between them: the estimate never tested against the cost of ownership, the information requirement nobody wrote before design began, the handover condition waived to protect a date, the register that does not reconcile to the assets it purports to describe. Arranging the domains by stage makes an uncovered stage visible as an empty stage, which is the one thing a functional breakdown cannot show you.
If you arrived here holding a particular obligation, the role entry points take the same domains and arrange them behind the standard you already work under: GAGAS and the IIA Standards for an auditor, IPSAS 45 for an accountant, the GAO cost and schedule guides for a cost controller. Each of those says, in its own words, that the criteria are the reader’s to establish.
Asset lifecycle method01
The 6 domains in fullInception & Development
The decision-making framework
Are the criteria by which options were chosen written down, and is it recorded who was entitled to choose?
Definition maturity and the estimate
Does the estimate state the class it was produced at, and does that class match the scope definition actually achieved?
Whole-life cost and the operating consequence
Has the cost of owning this asset been estimated by, or at least shown to, the people who will have to pay it?
Information requirements, set before design
Has the owner stated what it will need to know in order to run this asset, before the design that produces the information begins?
Sanction and the authority to stop
Who is entitled to stop this, and have they ever been given information that would let them?
02
The 6 domains in fullDelivery & Controls
Baseline integrity
Is the baseline currently being reported against the one that was sanctioned, and if not, is every step between the two documented?
Change, planned and unplanned
Are changes assessed before they are made, and does anyone examine changes that were made without being assessed?
Forecast credibility
Does the forecast reflect what is now known, or does it reflect what was committed?
Externally provided processes and services
Where activities that affect the asset have been placed outside the organisation, has the organisation retained the ability to know whether they were done?
Interfaces between packages and functions
Has anyone examined the seams, as distinct from examining each of the things the seams join?
Competence of whoever is assuring
Do the people performing this assurance understand the thing they are examining, and where they do not, is the gap covered by someone who does?
03
The 5 domains in fullHandover & Transition
Information transfer against stated requirements
Was what was delivered tested against what was asked for, by someone who will have to use it?
Knowledge, as distinct from information
Has anyone captured why the asset is the way it is, and what was accepted rather than resolved?
Taking over, and what was waived to achieve it
Were the contractual conditions for taking over actually met, and where they were not, who agreed to proceed and on what record?
Recognition onto the asset register
Can the thing that was built be traced to the thing that appears on the balance sheet, in both directions?
Operational readiness of the organisation
Does an organisation exist that is capable of operating this asset on the day it is handed over, with people in post?
04
The 6 domains in fullOperations & Asset Management
An asset management system that is scoped
Is there a defined asset management system, and is it written down which assets it covers and which it does not?
The SAMP and the line back to organisational objectives
Can any asset management objective be traced upwards to an organisational objective, and downwards to something someone is doing this year?
Asset data and its quality
Is the data the organisation makes decisions from of a quality anyone has determined, and does anyone know when it was last true?
Performance evaluation and internal audit of the system
Is the asset management system itself audited, by people competent to audit it, on a programme derived from risk?
Predictive action
Does the organisation act on what it expects to happen, or only on what has already happened?
Alignment of the financial and technical view
Do the finance function and the engineering function describe the same asset base in terms that reconcile?
Applying each domain through the method
For every domain, this table identifies one means that the publication uses to examine it or obtain evidence: a record of the method at a step, a step of either method, a tool, or the domain’s own tests. Direct means it produces evidence one of the domain’s tests asks for; indirect means it bears on the subject without producing that evidence. The reach is this publication’s reading.
Correspondence
If something here is wrong, that is worth more than agreement.
Material errors are corrected on the affected pages. Messages are used to reply, not to build a mailing list.
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