Think about how we get VfM success for most significant policies or projects… What was your answer? It’s not the grand launch or the main flow of activity. It’s more likely not forgetting about the risk of slow, silent decay that happens afterwards. The important bit is the unglamorous, untracked, undervalued and underfunded world of maintenance – ignoring it is the certain way to turn a good-looking high-value investment into poor Value for Money.
Even if you’re not making a capital investment the analogy still holds – sustained results after you leave the arena are what maximises VfM.
Remeber, whoever, or whatever, sits at at the end of the workstream are the ultimate beneficiaries of good planning. There’s nothing more frustrating and dispiriting than seeing a big difference to your life appear and then seeing it falling into disrepair and eventually disuse for the want of a little upkeep.
A life-and-death matter – literally
An Observer article about public access defibrillators across the UK drastically demonstrates what this can mean. Despite being installed with the best of intentions, many defibrillators have been found to be faulty, inaccessible, or poorly maintained when they were actually needed. The consequences have been tragic – including cases in my hometown of Sheffield. (https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/faulty-and-inaccessible-defibrillators-linked-to-dozens-of-deaths)
It’s a stark real life-and-death reminder that capital investment alone doesn’t deliver sustainable outcomes.
Simply put: infrastructure without maintenance is just future waste.
Building for the long-term
The Observer article reminded me of work I was involved in with the UK’s International Development agency on rural water and sanitation in Nepal. The Gurkha Welfare Trust, particularly, were (and still are) putting a focus not only on building infrastructure, but also ensuring it would still function 10, 15, even 20 years later. That’s why maintenance and operations were built into the programme from the start, for example:
- Each scheme trained local community maintenance workers
- Every water system had a dedicated repairs and upkeep fund
These kinds of sustainable local initiatives mean that repairs don’t rely on external “rescue”.
The result? The systems were more resilient, cheaper to maintain, and statistically far more likely to deliver better Value for Money over time than the cheaper upfront alternatives used elsewhere across the country.
The VfM lesson
Of course, the lessons go beyond defibrillator installation and the development sector.
Value for Money is about looking at that long stream of benefits that we ought to be able to secure and then wisely allocating resources to make that sustainable.
It isn’t always about choosing the lowest cost option upfront, rather it’s about designing services and infrastructure that are sustainable.
The training course to find out how
Getting this right isn’t academic. It’s the difference between a project that delivers lasting value and one that fails to deliver everything it can. frameworks to design and deliver sustainable outcomes from day one.
My training series on VfM gives you the practical realities and underpinning knowledge to tackle the time dimension in VfM and a hundred (at least) other important issues. You can choose the core introductory course and other optional modules that all run regularly.
Full details on the training series and booking can be found at https://www.strategyandevidence.com/training/value-for-money/ or drop me an email from the contact link on the website menu.