Auditing is a great way to establish a baseline understanding of maturity for your asset management functions. It involves ranking yourself against best practices, identifying what you are good at, and where you need to improve. It is an integral part of developing the action plan that will allow you to continue to mature and add value in the future.

Organisations who regularly audit their asset management functions tend to be well disciplined and operate with a steady cadence that drives value for their shareholders or owners. The results from their audits trend positively and reflect on the maturity within the organisation. This furthermore reflects in the culture within the teams, their engagement with everyday business, and the retainment of the workforce.

There are those organisations that while they regularly audit themselves and identify the gaps, the process ends there. They fail to construct an action plan that would address the gaps to create further value, or they fail to deploy and implement their action plan. There is no surprise then that their regular auditing results show no improvement, or worse a decline in maturity. After all, value is created from the improvement process by implementing the actions from the audits, not by simply completing the audit.

• You don't have to gold plate everything.
• You need to implement the actions.
• If you do what you say you will do and demonstrate an improvement, then you can shift the culture dial in the right direction.
• Developing and executing the roadmap for improvement.
• Continually re-auditing to show the maturity improvement and to realign the roadmap.