Your Capital Plan Needs a Glucose Monitor

You spent two hundred million dollars rehabilitating your sewer system.

Did it work?

I do not mean did the projects finish, or did the money get spent. Those always happen. I mean: did the system get healthier, and can you show me the curve?

I have watched rooms full of smart people fail to answer that question, and the reason is not laziness. The reason is that we measure infrastructure the way medicine measured patients in 1985: one blood pressure reading a year, filed away. A snapshot. A static KPI.

Now look at what a continuous glucose monitor gives a diabetic. Not a reading: a curve. The spike after the meal, the response to the insulin, the drift overnight. The trend, and the trend's answer to the intervention. Same body, same chemistry, completely different kind of knowing.

Fig. 01 / Vital signsThe Systems Lens

From a snapshot to a response

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A static KPI tells you a number. A cybernetic KPI tells you whether what you are doing is working.

Hardeep AnandThe Systems Lens

That difference has a name, and it is older than you think. In 1948, Norbert Wiener published Cybernetics, helping establish the science of control and communication through feedback. He took the name from the Greek kybernetes: the steersman of a ship. The founding word of the science behind automation and AI is a man steering a vessel through water. This science was always ours.

Fig. 02 / Vital signsThe Systems Lens

The reading is only the beginning

The framework: the Curve Test

One framework, four steps, drawable on a napkin. Run it against any program your utility funds.

1. Name the vital sign. Which KPI is this money supposed to move? Not "improve the system." Name the number.
2. Draw the baseline. What has that curve done for the last three years? No baseline, no test.
3. Spend, then watch the curve. Not the budget curve. The physiology: did the trend bend after the intervention?
4. Feed the answer forward. The bend, or its absence, reshapes the next capital decision. That is the loop. A loop without step 4 is just reporting.

Fig. 03 / Vital signsThe Systems Lens

Four steps. One closed loop.

Three vital signs, read like a doctor

Non-revenue water is internal bleeding. Treated water, already pumped, cleaned, and paid for, that never earns revenue. Some escapes through leaks; some is delivered but measured or billed incorrectly, and some is authorized use that is not billed. AWWA distinguishes real leakage from apparent metering and billing losses, because they require different remedies. ASCE’s 2021-era estimate put treated-water losses at roughly six billion gallons a day. That is a measure of the scale, not a diagnosis of your system. The static report says "our NRW is 28 percent" the way a chart note says "patient is bleeding." The Curve Test: district metering finds the bleed, repairs close it, and the next four quarters help test whether the repairs reduced the loss. Check that the apparent improvement is not simply a change in consumption, metering, or accounting. The IWA water balance and AWWA M36 are the instruments; the loop is what most utilities are missing.

Infiltration and inflow is fluid overload. Groundwater leaking into sewers and stormwater entering through unwanted connections add flow the system was not meant to carry. Think of it as fluid overload: a useful analogy for extra hydraulic load, rather than identical biology. The honest test of a $200M rehab: when the next big rain comes, does the flow spike at the plant bend lower than last year's? Flow against rainfall, year over year, comparing similar storms and accounting for changes in the service area or operations. EPA’s sewer-analysis resources describe tools for assessing rainfall-derived infiltration and inflow. If nobody can produce that chart, the program was measured by its spending, not its physiology.

Pollutant loads are cholesterol. A municipal stormwater permit’s pollutant-load target plays a role like a cholesterol target: it gives you a condition to manage over time. You do not cure it in one procedure; you manage it down with best management practices, the watershed’s version of diet and exercise, and you watch the labs trend across seasons. The permit report is the lab panel. The trend is the health.

Fig. 04 / Vital signsThe Systems Lens

All the data. None of the response.

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Boards do not need more numbers. They need to see the curve bend after the money lands.

Hardeep AnandThe Systems Lens

"But my meters are twenty years old"

This is the honest objection, and it is usually right. Most systems cannot pull a clean continuous reading off the infrastructure they have. Here is the part that matters: you almost never need new sensors to start. The first curve comes from data you already own, sitting in pieces. Flow at the plant against rainfall is in your SCADA history. Consumption against production is in your billing. The baseline for non-revenue water is in records you already file. The first project is not instrumentation. It is connecting what is already there into a line you can read. New meters make the curve sharper later. They are not the price of admission.

Fig. 05 / Vital signsThe Systems Lens

The first project is connection

The money: prevention versus the emergency room

Healthcare offers a useful principle: diagnosing a problem early can create better options than waiting for an emergency. Infrastructure asks the same question at a different scale. Prevention still needs a case: compare the cost of the work with the likelihood and consequences of failure. A capital plan is preventive medicine; every project buys down a specific, nameable risk before the event. The alternative is the emergency room, which in this sector is called a consent decree. Atlanta’s Clean Water Atlanta program estimated its overall sewer improvements at close to four billion dollars. That is a program estimate, not a fine or a precise measure of the cost of deferred maintenance. The lesson is about who sets the timetable: a utility has more choice when it acts before compliance failures force the schedule.

And the cascade does not stop at the fence line. Energy is the system's metabolism. Resilience is its immune system. The end of the cascade is property values, public health, and the rates of the people the system serves.

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A utility's vital signs end up in its citizens' bodies and wallets. That is not a metaphor. That is what the loop does when you follow it far enough.

Hardeep AnandThe Systems Lens

What to take into your next meeting

Five practical ways to tell whether your infrastructure investment is improving the system.

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1. Ask what improved, not just what was completed. Finishing a project and spending its budget do not tell you whether it worked. Look for a measurable change, such as less water lost to leaks or lower sewer flows during comparable storms.
2. Agree on the measure before you spend. Choose the result the project should improve. Record the trend before the work, compare it with the trend afterward, and use what you learn to decide what to fund next.
3. Track the problems your system actually faces. For drinking water, track treated water that is lost or never billed. For sewers, compare excess flow with rainfall. For water quality, track pollution over time and across seasons.
4. Use early warnings to guide preventive work. A worsening trend can help you identify where maintenance or investment is needed before a failure forces an emergency response.
5. Start with the records you already have. Bring flow readings, rainfall records, billing and production data together. Check dates, units and missing information so you can make a fair comparison before buying more sensors or adding AI.

One question to ask: “What result should this investment improve, and what evidence will show us whether it did?”

Your Capital Plan Needs a Glucose Monitor
Hardeep Anand · The Systems Lens
https://hardeepanand.com/writing/vital-signs/

Next steps

If you sit on a board or run a utility, take one question into your next meeting: "For the program we just funded, which KPI curve will prove it worked, and when will we see it bend?" Then ask whether your data can even draw the baseline. If it cannot, that is the real first project.

Start putting this to work by connecting the records needed to draw one credible baseline. Bring that curve to your next capital-planning discussion, along with the question it is meant to answer.

Next in this series: The Steersman, on why three systems that look nothing alike, nature's water loop, the one we built, and your own body, all run the same machinery. Subscribe so it lands in your inbox.

Reply with one KPI curve that bent after a capital program in your system. That chart is the most underrated document in public infrastructure, and I collect them.