Unmonitored Capital Improvement Programs (CIPs) notoriously slip into service of squeaky wheels. Whatever makes the most noise gets funding. Fortunately, most agencies watch their CIPs. They want to make sure things get done. INSERT HERE.
Which things get done - prioritization - trips people up.
How they get done - management - tends to catch people by surprise.
How much it costs to get things done changes with every year.
To serve the interests of the agency and its clients, Ewers Engineering developed a software tool to critical system elements quietly go belly-up, then have to be funded through expensive capitalization. When this happens, communities often lose their ability to adapt and begin a decades-long service to debt financing.
Better to evaluate the risk to the community or utility for each project, then prioritize the projects for funding from highest risk to lowest risk. This reveals what projects need funding and when. As a result, agencies can set aside money and staffing resources in anticipation of large needs.
That's exactly what we do with RD/CIP, our proprietary CIP development software. RD/CIP allows agencies to build realistic project costs and timelines, prioritizes projects based on their modeled risk to the community. It also treats project cost, risk, and time as dynamic elements.
Project risk of failure increases if a project isn't funded by deadlines.
Project costs increase with an annual inflation rate or set of rates, avoiding the mistake of putting projects on the street based on out-of-date cost estimates.
Have you got a CIP that keeps funding the easy projects (even while important system elements reach the end of their service life)? If you want to implement an intelligent, systematic, and transparent approach to CIP prioritization, give us a call about licensing RD/CIP to provide ongoing CIP development.
