From 28 February – 4 March 2011, the first meeting of the International Standards Organisation Project Committee ISO PC251 was held in Melbourne, Australia.
The ISO PC251 Committee’s role is to develop the proposed ISO Standard for Asset Management and was established in August 2010 by the ISO Technical Management Board (ISO/TMB). The Committee includes representatives from 23 peak asset management organisations including Australia, Austria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, Japan, USA, France, UK, Portugal, Sweden, and Netherlands – all of whom opted in to support the proposed Standard.
Since the August 2010 meeting of the ISO/TMB, three Working Drafts have been circulated to ISO PC251 Committee Members for comments, including:
- An Overview, principles and terminology document;
- A Requirements document; and
- An Application guidelines on the Requirements document.
The main purpose of this first meeting of ISO PC251 Committee was to review the received comments, and to create a second round of Working Drafts of each document for the Committee to further review over the coming months.
In order to manage the workload, the ISO/PC 251 Committee established an organisational sub-structure which includes two Working Groups. The Working Groups are:
- WG1 – Overview, principles and terminology
- WG2 – Requirements and Application guidelines
The initial Working Drafts were based on documents that had originally been submitted by the United Kingdom, and were based on the British Standard Institute’s published PAS 55. Subsequently, amendments were made during the preliminary ISO/TMB meeting held in August 2010.
The ISO/TMB’s Joint Technical Coordination Group for management system standards (the JTCG) has proposed a High Level Structure, which includes identical text and common terminology for all ISO management system standards. The proposed asset management standards being developed by ISO PC251, will be developed in compliance with the ISO/JTG requirements for a management system standard.
One of the key issues the ISO PC251 Committee resolved was the fitting of the contents of the Requirements document into the proposed JTCG High Level Structure, including the removal of duplication due to the JTCG’s identical text.
Further, with the recent publication of ISO 31000 on risk management, the extent of inclusion of risk issues within the proposed asset management standards needed to be reconsidered.
Other issues considered included the creation of revised definitions for terms such as ‘asset’, ‘asset management’, ‘asset management system’ and ‘life cycle’ needed to make the document less oriented towards ‘physical’ types of assets.
The ISO PC251 Committee held two Open Forum sessions after the opening plenary meeting to discuss these issues in order to allow all participants to contribute to the discussions.
In line with the recommendations of the JTCG above, ISO PC251 agreed to develop an outline ‘Design Specification’ for each of its documents in order to guide each of the two Working Groups. However, instead of fixing these as rigid specifications, the ISO PC251 Committee decided to keep them as “live” documents that will be continuously evolved, and subsequently will be reviewed at the start of each Committee meeting.
The ISO PC251 Committee also examined the timeline for the development of the three documents to establish formal target dates for their publication. While there was some discussion over the merits of allowing the Application guidelines document an extended development time (as it is dependent on the Requirements document being established first), it was decided that it is preferable to try and launch the three documents as a set on the same target date. Therefore, it was agreed to follow ISO’s 3 year default timeline for the development of these documents.
The ISO PC251 Committee also examined the structure and numbering of the documents and adopted a resolution to request the ISO to permit it to develop three separate standards (as opposed to a single standard in 3 Parts), with the following numbers and titles:
- ISO 55000 Asset management – Overview, principles and terminology
- ISO 55001 Asset management – Management systems – Requirements
- ISO 55002 Asset management – Management systems – Guidelines on the application of ISO 55001
To continue momentum towards finishing the documents, both Working Groups aim to achieve a second Working Draft of the Overview and Requirements documents by June 2011, and of the Application guidelines document by August 2011. These documents will be circulated to the members of the ISO PC251 Committee for review and comment.
The ISO PC251 Committee has accepted an invitation from ANSI to hold its next meeting in October 2011 in the Washington DC area of the United States of America.