News & Insights

Implementation Advisory

Transforming asset management for higher education

Higher-education leaders have faced several years of market-driven concerns, procurement challenges, and shifting priorities. Institutions need more effective, predictive, and financially achievable processes to manage assets amid these (and other) context concerns. Universities must re-evaluate master planning initiatives, funding sources, aspiration achievability, and prioritization of project timelines.

Increasingly, institutions must weigh the value of re-investing in existing assets versus demolishing them and/or building new facilities. In these deliberations, leaders ask, how can we:

• Create a decision-making framework for prioritizing capital improvements and system resources?
• Comprehensively understand and communicate system needs and priorities?
• Dynamically plan in the current environment?

Setting the stage for the strategic planning of comprehensive asset stewardship

Using an institution’s housing portfolio as an example, the following walks through B&D’s approach to advising institutions seeking to answer the above questions.

The residential experience and housing portfolio significantly impact multiple facets of an institution, including campus recruitment, finances, operational requirements, total deferred maintenance, security, student experience and success outcomes, and capital planning. To capture the complexity of the impact housing has on an institution, B&D transforms and expands the original questions to develop these guiding questions:

1. How will planned projects impact the financial health of the housing system?
2. How will planned projects impact the physical health of the housing system?
3. How will planned projects impact the net value of housing assets?

Which leads us to t his comprehensive inquiry from which we build a hypothesis: “How can projects be most effectively planned, and resources most effectively deployed, to improve the system’s physical health and maintain financial health while advancing institutional aspirations?”

Thoroughly and honestly answering these questions positions the institution to identify and prioritize resource allocations to realize the greatest outcome-based impacts. However, to effectively chart an optimal course forward with unintended consequences mitigated, the institution must first understand their current position within their context.

Institutional commitment to collaboratively develop and guide impact

The impact of an institution’s housing portfolio extends far beyond the residential life program. A housing officer will likely be the primary steward of the housing program, and responsible for strategic direction and execution of the initiatives. But to be most effective, support, collaboration, and expertise of their peers in finance, planning, facilities, enrollment, maintenance, dining, and student life are essential. For this reason, B&D recommends forming a core steering group to bring unique perspectives. The group, together, will uncover unintentional consequences as strategy is developed. The expanded expertise secures an optimized and cohesively committed path forward.

Given the highly integrated and impactful position residential portfolios hold within a university, collaboration across multiple stakeholders is essential to comprehensively address these inquiries. As residential life professionals and housing-adjacent disciplines begin to partner with B&D, comprehensive insights on long and short-term impacts emerge. These insights then guide, inform, and advance strategy development. The new awareness and ability to effectively communicate “across silos” provide significant value to the team and institution, not least of which are co-ownership of outcomes and a shared understanding of the foundational reasoning for proposed resource allocations, policy modifications, and the initiative’s schedule and sequencing.

Characteristics of a successful inquiry

B&D assists institutions to elevate their understanding of the broad connectivity and impact of program-specific decision-making on their system and/or campus. The process includes first understanding and then mapping the existing financial, physical, operational, and experiential context. Once the framework is mapped, the four views of current institutional conditions are overlaid with expanded insights from financial model projections, existing facility condition index reports and/or deferred maintenance logs, operational policies, portfolio tours, current strategic and master plans, proposed / scheduled capital planning efforts, and the like.

From this robust platform of context and expanded inquiries, B&D begins an iterative experience to guide institutions through hypothesis building, testing, and modifying to reach a path towards an achievable, impactful, and comprehensively healthy outcome.

The effectiveness of the iterative hypothesis development and testing process must be:

• Grounded in institutional knowledge. Professionals who are responsible for an institution’s financial, operational, physical, and aspirational conditions are uniquely qualified to understand the factors required to develop, manage, and maintain them. The effort is built on a foundation which is multi-focused, embraces integrative thoughtfulness, and respects the investment an institution has made to understand its buildings, aspirations, and resources.
• Targeted. First-person knowledge of the institution’s stewards of finance, operations, the physical plant, facility management, and custodial departments and any existing modeling, FCI’s, DM logs, and historic work order requests of the existing facilities are integral and essential to this process.
• Dynamic. The hypothesis development and testing, and subsequent prioritization and optimization of outcomes, do not result in a static report.  The purpose of this iterative engagement is to provide a framework for continuous and comprehensive planning over a set time-period. The university-controlled inputs allow for changing realities and initiatives to be updated and remain relevant over time.
• Tied to financial and operational modeling. Optimization requires hypotheses to integrate financial modelling and operational policies utilizing the university’s information, projections, and resource allocation approaches. This integration allows institutions to test scenarios, determine optimal funding strategies, optimize operations, and anticipate the health or decline of physical and financial portfolios overtime.
• Institutionally influenced and accessible. Once B&D and the institution complete the initial set of framework-building and hypothesis-cycle iterations, the institution’s trained champion and/or end-users will be responsible for future collaborations and updating.  Many institutions re-engage B&D periodically to provide quarterly resets/health checks to the models, to update the framework to reflect outcome attainment, or to moderate a new hypothesis development cycle and facilitate the development of next-step optimization recommendations.

Asset management planning and stewardship

In summary, institutional asset management, regardless of asset-type, must not occur in a silo.  Portfolios of assets–and their associated financial, physical, operational, and experiential components– impact, and are impacted by, the reality and intentionality of multiple adjacent and intersecting programs.

B&D’s approach to comprehensive asset management planning allows institutions to fully understand where there are available “levers-to-pull” and how they “move-the-needle” toward outcomes, across all impacted systems.  We then communicate these relationships by way of graphic and overlayed views, models, and institutional scenario testing. While closely related to traditional master planning exercises, B&D’s approach to asset stewardship optimizes and communicates across the system, while creating co-ownership of decisions regarding the timing and prioritization of efforts, levels of investment, necessary resource allocation and policy modifications, and anticipated intensity of impacts on the student, faculty, and staff experience.

To discuss B&D’s dynamic and targeted approach to asset management planning and portfolio stewardship, please reach out to Rebecca Geraghty (rgeraghty@bdconnect.com),  Carrie Rollman (crollman@bdconnect.com) or TJ Logan (tlogan@bdconnect.com).  We would appreciate the opportunity to show you examples of past engagements, institutional perspectives and outcomes, and simply discuss your institution’s portfolio and current context.