Most council Activity Management Plan dashboards are PDFs in disguise. A Power BI front-end stitched to a single Excel export, refreshed quarterly when somebody remembers, with charts that look like dashboard charts but that nobody actually opens between AMP cycles.
The Porirua AMP programme TTAP delivered across two cycles (2021–2024 and 2024–2027) was audited by Road Efficiency Group and ranked No. 3 nationally — score rising from 2.56 to 2.78 out of 3. Tasman and Masterton are now on the same methodology for their 2024–2027 cycles. The pattern of what works has been consistent across all three.
Six things make a dashboard useful, not decorative.
1. The data model is the asset register, not a parallel copy
The most common failure mode: the AMP dashboard reads from a snapshot that was hand-exported from RAMM in the week the AMP was written, then left to age. By month four of the new cycle, the dashboard shows the state of the world a year ago.
The fix is mechanical. The dashboard reads from RAMM (or the equivalent asset-register-of-record) on a scheduled refresh, with the transformations documented and version-controlled so that “where did this number come from” is always traceable to a query. Power BI’s incremental refresh handles the volume; the discipline is in the data model layer.
For Porirua, we ran a quarterly refresh cycle aligned to the council’s own asset-register update cadence. That meant the AMP dashboard always matched what was in RAMM within 90 days. Not real-time — but no longer twelve months stale.
2. Asset condition is a profile, not a number
The temptation in an AMP dashboard is to show a single “network condition score” that goes up and down quarter-on-quarter. That number hides everything that matters.
What matters is the distribution. Of the sealed pavement asset base, how much is in Condition 1 (excellent), how much in Condition 2, how much in Condition 3, how much in Condition 4 (poor) and Condition 5 (very poor)? How is that distribution moving over time? Is the renewal programme keeping pace with deterioration, or are we losing ground in the mid-tail (Condition 3 sliding to Condition 4)?
A single average masks the bimodal distribution that almost every council network has — pockets of excellent condition next to pockets where the next reseal cycle is overdue. The dashboard has to surface that shape.
3. Renewal forecasting is grounded in the forward works programme
Forecasting renewals from condition decay curves alone produces numbers that don’t match what’s actually scheduled. The AMP dashboard has to overlay the forward works programme (FWP) — the actual chip-seal cycle, the actual pavement renewal contracts, the actual drainage capex programme — against the condition profile. Where they align, the dashboard reads as defensible. Where they don’t, that gap is the leading indicator the council needs to see.
For Porirua, this meant the AMP dashboard had a “renewal coverage” view showing each year of the next five years with the FWP commitment sitting next to the condition-based renewal need. Where coverage was below 80%, the cell turned amber. Where it was below 60%, red. No charts that need interpretation — just a fast scan that surfaces the budget conversation.
4. Levels of service tie to the One Network Framework
The Road Efficiency Group’s One Network Framework (ONF) gives every piece of council road a category, and each category has expected levels of service for surface condition, road safety, drainage performance, and so on. The AMP dashboard has to reference ONF categories explicitly — not the council’s historical road classification, not “roads we think are important”.
The benefit is at REG audit time. The auditor checks whether the AMP addresses each ONF category against its expected level of service, and whether the gap between current and expected is being closed by the work programme. When the dashboard’s structure mirrors the audit structure, the audit becomes a read of the dashboard rather than a two-week reconstruction exercise.
This was the single largest contributor to Porirua’s score rise from 2.56 to 2.78. The data didn’t change — the structure that exposed it did.
5. Economic appraisal is per-asset-class, not network-aggregate
Every AMP needs to argue for funding. The funding argument is stronger when the cost-per-outcome is per asset class, not a single network-level BCR. A reseal cycle on the Class 1 arterial network has a different BCR than a reseal cycle on Class 5 rural roads — both matter, but they argue different cases to NZTA.
The dashboard’s economics view should break out:
- Annual maintenance spend per asset class
- Forward renewals per asset class
- Per-asset-class deterioration cost-of-doing-nothing
- ROI of intervention on each asset class
When the LTP funding conversation comes, the dashboard gives the council a per-asset-class breakdown that maps directly to NZTA’s investment categories.
6. The narrative around the data is curated, not auto-generated
A dashboard without commentary is a Rorschach test. Different councillors will read the same charts and come to opposite conclusions. The AMP dashboard has to ship with a documented narrative for each major view — “what does this chart mean”, “what should I be looking at”, “what action does this trigger”.
For Porirua, that meant a curated set of one-page commentaries attached to each tab of the Power BI dashboard, updated each quarterly refresh. The commentary lives in the same workbook as the data — so when the data changes, the comment about that data is the next thing the analyst updates.
This is the part most councils skip because it’s authorial work, not data work. It’s also the part that decides whether the dashboard actually changes decisions.
What we are doing about it
For TTAP’s three AMP councils, the dashboard methodology above is now the operational standard. Tasman and Masterton are mid-cycle on it right now. The next REG audit cycle will tell us whether the pattern holds across three different network shapes — but the early indicators are consistent.
If your council is mid-AMP cycle and the dashboard isn’t yet defensible at audit, talk to us. The six items above are diagnostic — we usually find at least three need strengthening before the next audit.