Last week I had the pleasure of co-presenting with Jennifer Meneses of the University of Saskatchewan (USask) at the Rocky Mountain APPA conference on the evolution of their Asset Management program.  I was pleased to have the opportunity to share a small role that my team and I have played in their program that started over 20 years ago.  Jennifer and her team are very humble so I wanted to take a moment to brag on their program to a wider audience that may not be aware of their industry-leading program. 

Back in the early 2000s, USask embarked on their first foray into Asset Management.  They licensed the Capital Asset Management System ReCAPP and conducted their first round of Facility Condition Assessments.  This was one of Jennifer’s first assignments when she joined the USask team.  It is extremely rare, in my experience, for a university to have such stability in leadership for an asset management program over more than two decades.  

It was shortly thereafter that I met Jennifer at a ReCAPP users conference in 2003.  She did a presentation on their newly minted program.  I was impressed with the approach she and her team had taken.  I have stayed connected with Jennifer since that time and have watched as she and her team were reassigned to different departments every few years as overall reorganization programs swept through the school.  The one constant though was Jennifer.  She was always there steering the ship despite new bosses, new departmental requirements and new priorities.

USask has been lucky that their program has grown right along side Jennifer (and because of her leadership).  Often when the leader of a program changes, the new person comes in and wants to put their own stamp on the program and kills all momentum that their predecessor built up.  In this case there were no such interruptions and it shows in the USask program.  

I had the opportunity to stay connected with Jennifer through the ReCAPP user’s network (my previous employer was a strategic partner with ReCAPP) and through several APPA conferences over the years.  I was able to get semi-regular updates on Jennifer’s program as she evolved it and grew it over the years.  

Our story will fast forward to 2012, when ReCAPP was essentially moth-balled as a result of an acquisition by a competitor.  However, Jennifer and her team continued to use the software (refusing to upgrade to the acquirer’s product) despite the fact that it was no longer supported. Allowing them to continue their program as before.  However, as with any technology, when it stops being supported eventually cracks start to appear.

We will continue sharing USask’s Asset Management success story in next week’s post, which focuses on when I had a chance to be a part of the program that up until that point I was admiring from afar.