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Smart Places Playbook
Manage and review
After delivering your smart place project, you must maintain assets, follow risk management and foster continuous improvement for success.
Goals of this stage
Once a smart place project has been delivered, there is ongoing work required. During this stage you will need to:
- maintain your assets. You can use the asset management plan developed at the design stage and refined during the create stage.
- maintain engagement with the community, making data and insights available and maintaining transparency about the use of smart technologies in public spaces
- carry out project reviews with people across the organisation
- evaluate the project to see if benefits are being realised using the benefits realisation plan developed during the design stage
- maintain rigour around cyber security
- address any policy or process gaps
- support your organisation to use the data and insights generated during decision making.
Maintaining engagement
During operations, be transparent with your community about:
- the data being generated in public spaces and its uses
- outcomes of evaluation, including any benefits and outcomes delivered
- any data breaches or cyber security incidents
- how they can provide feedback on the use of smart technologies.
You should also make data and insights publicly available. Learn about involving your community.
Veitch Lister Consulting
Managing change and monitoring progress
You will need to support your organisation through the change of introducing new technologies, assets and real-time data to your organisation.
A change management plan can help you:
- map new processes
- establish the internal and external stakeholders
- identify risks
- plan supporting communications and engagement activities.
You should also develop a risk management plan.
During the design and create stages, you will have identified people across your organisation who now play a role in operating your smart solution.
This likely includes people responsible for maintenance of physical assets, data and information technology people.
During the early stages of operation, you should consider meeting regularly with this group.
Together, you should:
- identify any challenges that need to be addressed
- check that documented processes and policies are supporting the operation of the solution
- identify emerging risks to be managed
- identify additional people that need to be engaged
- uncover skills and capability gaps and learning needs.
You should consider using the Smart Places Maturity Assessment Framework to assess your progress and inform your next steps.
Be sure to amend your change management and risk management plans to act on the feedback you receive and outcomes of the maturity framework assessment.
Section 3 of the Smart Places Playbook Standards (PDF 600.18KB) provides examples and details of effective risk management.
Using insights
To support decision making and drive the outcomes desired from smart places, make sure any data collected is translated into actionable insights.
In the design stage, you will have established your organisation's data insights and visualisation needs. In the create stage, you will have delivered solutions.
During the manage and review stage, you will need to support decision makers to use the new insights being generated. This may involve:
- understanding how and when decisions are made
- supporting process changes so that insights can be included in decision-making processes
- checking that insights are helping to inform decisions and action to achieve your outcome or address your problem.
Related resources: Using insights
Smart Places resource: Data for Places – A practitioner's guide
The Data for Places: A practitioner's guide to applying place-based data for effective place management will help practitioners (or place owners) use data when managing places.
Smart Places Maturity Assessment Framework
A solid understanding of your current smart place maturity level is essential. This will help inform and guide future actions and initiatives. The Smart Places Maturity Assessment Framework is a practical tool designed to help place managers at this stage.
Maintaining assets
You should deliver on the asset management plans created in the design stage and refined in create stage.
Depending on the ownership and partnership models in place, you may be responsible for maintaining all assets. This includes:
- new or upgraded digital connectivity infrastructure
- devices and enabling infrastructure
- data
- platforms and systems for managing data
- data storage systems
- data visualisation platforms and tools
- other supporting software and systems.
Read about asset management planning for further guidance.
When assets reach the end of their useful life, they should be decommissioned or replaced. This can happen when:
- benefits are not being realised
- costs of maintenance outweigh the benefits being realised
- technology has been superseded
- physical infrastructure is due to be replaced.
Post-delivery project reviews and evaluation can help you to identify if assets need to be retired early.
Related resources: Maintaining assets
Smart Places resources
Technical Guidance: Cataloguing Assets
This Technical Guidance: Cataloguing Assets outlines an approach to cataloguing information on assets in smart places. It will help you:
- set up the foundations to maximise the deployment of digital connectivity
- reduce construction and street clutter
- leverage commercial opportunities.
It should be read in conjunction with the relevant standards and legislative requirements.
Data for Places – A practitioner's guide
The Data for Places: A practitioner's guide to applying place-based data for effective place management includes specific guidance for how to manage and review data in places.
NSW Data Strategy
The NSW Government Data Strategy highlights the need to treat data as an asset and provides case studies to learn from.
Realising benefits
You should deliver the benefits realisation plan that is set out in the design phase, and refined during the create phase.
Use the data and insights gained from your smart place to evaluate the project against outcomes.
Take the following steps to evaluate your project:
- quantify changes to the place resulting from your project. It is important to have benchmarks and clear methods for measuring change before your project is delivered. Refer to delivering benefits that last for more information.
- assess if the project met its stated objectives
- identify any factors that impact benefits realisation
- seek feedback from customers and stakeholders (refer to managing change and monitoring progress).