Assessing human resources renovation needs in water utilities

Abstract

Human resources are one of the most important assets of water utilities being responsible for assuring systems’ management and playing an important role in the tacit forms of the organisational knowledge. In organisations with the responsibility to manage vast, diverse and long life cycle infrastructures, with an adequate level of service and acceptable risk, knowledge transfer between peers should be assured to maintain a stable human resources framework. In water utilities, strategic asset management should include the long term planning of human resources alongside with urban water infrastructure assets to ensure service sustainability. Based on these assumptions and driven by the legal obligations in developing infrastructure asset management (IAM) plans, AGS (Administração e Gestão de Sistemas de Salubridade, S.A.) created and implemented a novel Personnel Aging Index (PAI) with the main goal of evaluating the human resources framework, including employees’ age, its professional categories and the remaining time needed to transfer knowledge to new elements. The paper describes AGS’ approach to human resources management under the asset management policy and the index formulation. A case study regarding standardised performance indicators to evaluate human resources and PAI will be analysed allowing utilities’ comparison.