Capital Improvement Plans (CIPs) Made Easier
This post has been written by Brandon Oye, PE
If you are an infrastructure owner (Cities, I’m talking primarily to you), you understand that creating and maintaining a Capital Improvement Plan is far from easy.
Creating a comprehensive Capital Improvement Plan (CIP) involves multiple highly technical steps, including analyzing your infrastructure’s current and future performance, identifying critical projects to maintain an expected level of service, prioritizing and scheduling those projects, finding funding sources, and ultimately completing those projects. These steps are crucial to ensuring that the CIP provides value to you and that your infrastructure meets the expectations of your residents and business owners. And those are just a few of the steps in the process to create your CIP.
The real challenge comes in managing the CIP after it is created.
Within one month, things may have already changed. Perhaps you were fortunate enough to secure a grant for a project (which we can help with). The project – originally scheduled two years out – now needs to be completed within a year. Despite your good fortune, you will now have to reach a consensus on securing the local share of the project. Alternatively, a new priority is uncovered, and another project needs to slide into your CIP, disrupting the schedule of other projects.
Changes to your CIP are inevitable, constant, and necessary. Most CIPs are simply a spreadsheet with a list of projects, costs, and start years. When you try to keep the spreadsheet updated, it blows up in your face like an aggressively shaken bottle of Coke – and you’re left to try to clean up the mess.
When revising your CIP gets tough, you do what most people do… You throw it out the window and start putting out the fires directly in front of you, causing you to lose sight of the months of planning and effort that went into creating your original CIP.
After several years of inconsistent management, your dusty CIP is now a terrible representation of your needs. In a fit of optimism (or frustration), you finally say: “Let’s look at updating that CIP again.” The vicious cycle starts all over again.
Unfortunately, CIPs are much like the process of Comprehensive Plans for growing communities. They get created in good faith but many times sit on a shelf, fail to be maintained and updated in a fashion that continues to provide value to the community.
I have been a City Engineer for over 15 years. In that time, I have lived through those experiences. I’ve seen the issues first-hand and know your struggle. That’s why we at Moore Engineering knew there was a better way of handling those inevitable changes to your CIP. We recognized that our communities required a flexible and straightforward process to update their CIP consistently with the latest information.
Learning from those experiences, we spent the last several years creating a web-based CIP application that makes managing your CIP easier. The online system is also well-equipped to help you effortlessly create a CIP when you know your needs.
I have been with Moore Engineering my entire working career. Admittedly, I would, at times, question if our newly created CIP platform was as valuable to clients as we thought. However, every new employee we hire from other engineering firms who are familiar with Capital Improvement Plans has been amazed at how it works and is excited to help their communities with their CIP needs. These outside opinions confirmed that we created something extremely valuable for communities ready to take control of their CIP.
Beyond the ease of updating your CIP, the application has many other benefits:
Always Updated. Always Available.
Full access for staff and officials to have full visibility of the current CIP. Everyone is always looking at the most current version of the CIP, not an outdated file.
Summary Dashboard
A dashboard summarizing upcoming projects and the status of those projects. A one-stop shop for a quick update on the current status of your projects.
Simple Interface
A clean-looking CIP Project Summary reports that show the information you want to see about each project, like purpose, need, scope, cost, funding, location maps, and more. It’s not just a spreadsheet of projects. It is an interactive tool that allows you to better understand every project in your CIP, without needing clarification from staff. It can also provide a very clear view of your program or projects for easy presentations to boards, commissions/councils or the public.
Automatic Reporting
Additional reports that automatically update whenever any information is changed. You can see your CIP Summary showing all projects listed in order of start year, a breakdown of infrastructure types and the infrastructure expenses in the CIP, and a breakdown of all local and outside funding in the CIP. There is no need to update the reports separately. Each one is updated automatically based on the source data from each project in the CIP.
User Management
Access control lets you manage editing and viewing access to specific individuals on your team.
Exportable Documents
Exportable PDFs of the CIP. Just want to email a project summary to someone or get it into a council packet? You can do that.
Project Archives
An archive of all projects that have been completed and checked off from your CIP. Congrats!! Another project is done! Time to move on to the next.
Ready to Get Started?
We’re excited to use this with the communities committed to improving lives by building strong communities, which is our mission. I come to work every day with this mission in mind, and this CIP application is one way we can do this better than ever before.
If you are as excited as I am, let’s talk! We’ll explore how Moore Engineering can help your community with your CIP needs. Click here to sign up for a free 30 minute demo of the CIP web application.
I can’t wait to meet you!