Competencia

As stated above, the organizations still regularly face difficulties within their planning process because there is not always high-quality data available about the physical assets. The wastewater treatment chain is often a few steps ahead in this compared to the water system. This is simply because updating the data and conducting measurements for the thousands of

Condition SP3-AF, sub-condition 1: the executed activities are in line with the strategies, objective and plans

Condition SP4-AF, sub-condition 1: the assets are inspected and their operations and functions are measured

assets within the water system requires more efforts. Furthermore, the interviews demonstrated that the shortage in high-quality asset data seems to be slightly larger for Vechtstromen than for Zuiderzeeland, especially for the water system. This is likely because

Vechtstromen’s water system has developed over a very long time and is therefore less standardized, contains older assets and it is more difficult to trace back data.

Vechtstromen and Zuiderzeeland are however currently working on this. The organizations and their employees are becoming more are aware of the necessity to tackle this problem. They are therefore more and more focusing their attention on solutions such as: completing asset inventories, performing pilots to test certain software and conducting inspections and measurements. Both organizations even appointed project groups and/or created specific teams to tackle the issue of information management with an organization-wide scope. However, the problem is not such that it can be simply solved by conducting a onetime large- scale asset inventory and buying technology process this data. As stated before, the problem is often that information management is not always high on everyone agendas and the responsibilities and agreements are not always well defined and well known.

There is the need within both organizations to change the behavior of the employees regarding information management. Currently, overseers and other experts still have a lot of knowledge that is not stored within the information systems. Furthermore, not all observations in the field, incidents and changes in the asset system are registered. These behaviors originate from the organizational cultures. Employees tend to strongly focus on the ‘do’ phase of the PDCA cycle and less on the ‘check’ phase (e.g. registering data is seen as a distraction form the core tasks). Furthermore, there are still sometimes organizational silos within the civil services that obstruct the sharing of data. This will be discussed in Section 4.3.2.2.

The tactical-operational departments use many performance measures to assess technical and functional performances of the assets. For this sub-condition however, especially the performance measures used at the highest levels seem to form a limitation for the strategic alignment. As frequently mentioned by the interviewees, the organization-wide strategy control is often too focused on the efforts that have to be made. As result, success is often measured as on time, as promised and within budget. The focus is for example still too much on the costs for constructing the new river banks, whether the projects are completed within the planning and how many kilometers river banks are constructed. A comparison with the findings of Section 2.2.3 demonstrates that this corresponds with input, processes and output measures of asset interventions. Figure 12 (next page) visualizes how this relates with the step-by-step translation from mission and vision towards actions.

Line of thinking from mission and vision towards concrete line activities and projects

What to monitor: …. Mission and vision Mid-term objectives Long-term Program objectives

Strategies Projects and _{line activities}

Output for objective

Outcome Output for

intervention

Process/

Progress Input

Figure 12 Top: the translation from the mission and vision towards the projects and line activities. Bottom: the aspects that could be measured alongside these steps

The interviewees agreed that the current situation is not ideal. As stated by some of them, the organizations are able to successfully complete the planning & control cycle simply because the costs are within the budget and the planning is followed. Although this statement is an exaggeration, it illustrates that too little attention is paid to controlling the actual outcomes of

the organization’s actions in the water system and wastewater treatment chain. So, in case of

the nature-friendly river banks, too little attention is paid to monitoring the improved bio- diversity (the outcome) and studying whether this is better than alternatives. The danger of this is that the outcomes and the value creation become so much overshadowed that it becomes almost impossible to optimize them and continuously learn and improve.

Condition SP4-AF, sub-condition 2: strategy control uses a balanced and limited set of performance measures that is linked with objectives

The main reason of this uneven distribution in the organizations’ attention is the simple fact

that the performance measures too often focus on planning and financial performance. Moreover, indicators are often too qualitative and subjective and of an abstraction level that is too high (e.g. _{our assets are in a good state and comply with regulations). As result, they do} not always clearly reflect the impact of the organization’s activities and changes over time due

to continuous learning and improving.

Because of the shortage in reliable performance measures for the outcomes in the water system and wastewater treatment chain, the decision makers focus their attention on performance measures that are better available and more evident: planning and financial performance. However, the situations have improved within both organizations during the recent years. Both organizations have started to define and to use more and better performance measures about mid-term and long-term objectives. However, this alone cannot simply solve the problem. The focus on financial performance and planning is also embedded within the organizational cultures. This will be discussed in Section 4.3.2.2.

The previous analyses already discussed how the organizations are more and more following a zero-based budgeting approach that is based on factual information. The results of inspections and measurements are for example translated into risk and quality levels and these determine what operational actions will be executed. A relevant development in both organizations is the long-term asset planning (LTAP). This is a model is currently developed and has to unravel large bulks of asset data and provide forecasts about the trends in the expenditures, performances and risks over time. This should help the organizations to better and pro-actively plan activities over the long term and spread investments over time.

However, as stated before, the regional water authorities regularly face difficulties in the bottom-up translation of operational data towards tactical and strategical planning and using this data to make informed decisions about the organizational objectives and strategies. This can be attributed to the absence of a clear strategic frame of reference and the implicit link between the operational reference levels and the organizational objectives. The operational risk matrices are for example not based on a higher level business value matrix.