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Inception assurance
01.2

The decision-making framework

Are the criteria by which options were chosen written down, and is it recorded who was entitled to choose?

What goes wrong without it

This is the newest requirement in asset management and the one most organisations will fail on first, because it asks for something that usually exists only as habit. Without recorded criteria, an option appraisal cannot be audited: there is no standard against which to say the wrong option was selected, only a preference against a preference. It also makes delegation invisible, so nobody can establish afterwards whether the person who committed the money was entitled to.

What to examine

  • Ask for the documented decision-making criteria. Their absence is itself a nonconformity against ISO 55001:2024, not merely a weakness.
  • Check that the criteria cover the whole life of the asset and not only capital cost. Criteria that stop at delivery will select assets that are cheap to build and expensive to own.
  • Trace one significant option decision back through the criteria and confirm the recorded rationale matches them.
  • Confirm delegation limits exist in writing, and test one commitment against them.
  • Check the methods and tools used are stated, since the standard requires these alongside the criteria.

Required by

  • ISO 55001:2024, Clause 4.5, asset management decision-making, comprising 4.5.1 Framework, 4.5.2 Criteria and 4.5.3 Methods, processes and tools. This subclause is new in the second edition; it has no counterpart in ISO 55001:2014.
  • PMBOK Guide, Eighth Edition, November 2025, which carries governance as one of its seven performance domains.
  • ISO 21502:2020, Clause 6, on the project governance framework.

Read the sources

  • ISO 55001:2024, asset management system requirements2024 edition; read 2026-09-26.ISO’s product page: the publication details and ISO’s own summary of the standard, not the requirement text. The contents, foreword and introduction cited in this publication are taken from the standard’s preview pages hosted on the ANSI webstore, not from this page.

In the asset lifecycle method

The steps of the two methods that this domain examines.

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