Manage and review
Goals of this stage
Now your smart place project has been delivered, you will need to:
- Maintain your assets regularly. You can use the asset management plan developed during the Design stage
- Regularly review progress against your benefits realisation plan
- Maintain rigour around cyber security
- Identify missing policies and processes to support your organisation in operating smart solutions and plug these gaps
- Continually invest in the skills needed across your organisation to manage, maintain and operate your new digital assets and data
- Support your organisation to use the data and insights generated following your project to drive decision making and realisation of outcomes.
Maintaining engagement
Ongoing community engagement plays a significant role in maintaining social licence.
Achieving 'a social licence to operate' is based on the idea that place-owners need not only the planning approvals but also "social permission" to introduce and continue to operate smart places.
Social license does not refer to a formal agreement or document but to the real or current credibility, reliability, and acceptance of the smart place technologies and their use of data and information.
You should seek to engage customers on an ongoing basis to:
- Identify new uses for data collected
- Be transparent about the benefits and outcomes being delivered
- Communicate any data breaches
- Provide access to new data sources.
New stakeholders who were not involved in the early processes may form views that are different to those who were involved. You should welcome new perspectives so that all stakeholders are able to understand and participate in the smart place.
The Smart Places Customer Charter will help you establish and maintain social licence when you are planning, delivering and operating smart solutions in your place.
Realising benefits
You should deliver your benefits realisation plan, set out in your Design phase.
To evaluate and monitor your project you will need to:
- Monitor, track and record benefit measures and metrics
- Periodically review your project against intended outcomes
- Seek feedback from customers and stakeholders
- Gather and analyse data.
- Assess and compare the baseline benefits measures with the actual level of realisation.
By delivering a benefits realisation plan, you may uncover a need to change your approach or stop a project altogether. You may also identify further gaps in skills or the need for organisational change to support the adoption of insights to drive decision making.
Remember – having the digital assets and new data isn’t enough. You need to make sure the insights are being used to achieve outcomes.
Maintaining assets (including data)
You should deliver on the asset management plans created in the Design phase.
This will help ensure the benefits of smart places continue to be realised into the future.
Depending on the ownership and partnership models in place, you need to maintain all assets – including:
- physical above-ground infrastructure
- connectivity and below-ground infrastructure
- sensors and other devices
- software programs
- data.
Maintaining assets achieves balance across cost, risk, and performance.
Smart Place Resource: Technical Guidance - Cataloguing Assets
This technical guide outlines an approach to cataloguing information on assets in smart places to set up the foundations to maximise the deployment of digital connectivity, reduce construction and street clutter and leverage commercial opportunities. It should be read in conjunction with the relevant standards and legislative requirements.
Download now: Technical Guidance - Cataloguing Assets (PDF, 389.52 KB)
You should make sure software and data protection layers are updated regularly, and physical assets are operated per their guidelines and maintained to ensure they continue to operate efficiently. This includes monitoring power and ensuring connectivity.
When assets reach the end of their useful life, they should be decommissioned or replaced. This can happen when benefits are not being realised, the costs of maintenance outweigh the benefits being realised, or when the technology has been superseded. A rigorous benefits realisation plan will help you to identify if assets need to be retired early.
The NSW Data Strategy highlights the need to treat data as an asset and provides case studies to learn from.
Sharing lessons learned
Smart places is still an emerging field and sharing data, benefits realisation outcomes and lessons learned helps to build an evidence base that will benefit citizens for years to come.
As you deliver solutions, you have valuable knowledge that you can share with others.
Establishing best practices will be an ever-evolving process. By sharing the lessons from your project, you are contributing to the improvement of standards.
SmartNSW Case Study Library
The SmartNSW Case Study Library is a resource showcasing great outcomes for people and places enabled by smart technology and data solutions. Browse the library online to seerelevant examples in the manage and review stage.
2021 Smart Places Masterclass Series
This Masterclass series, co-hosted with the Australian Computer Society explored core drivers in smart places:
Managing risks and change
Risk refers to 'the effect of uncertainty on objectives' and is evident in all activities. The development of smart places presents many clear opportunities and manifests some risks. It is important you account for risks in a risk management plan and actively mitigate them.
Section 3 of the Smart Places Playbook Standards (PDF, 1.67 MB) provides examples and details of effective risk management.
Provide and share feedback
- Is the Playbook easy to use?
- Is there information missing?
- Send us case studies and tools that may be useful to others.
- Share lessons you have learned that can benefit others.