Read an Excerpt
The Facility Management Handbook
By Kathy O. Roper, Richard P. Payant AMACOM
Copyright © 2014 Kathy O. Roper and Richard P. Payant
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8144-3215-0
CHAPTER 1
The Nature of Facility Management
Pulse Points
• Both the organization and the facility manager should have a specific philosophy about facilities.
• Facility management (FM) is an essential business function; the facility manager is a business manager and should be placed at the same level as the managers of human resources and information technology.
• There are a limited number of ways to organize FM departments, depending on the mission of the organization supported.
• Every FM organization has some element contracted out, so contract negotiation and administration skills are essential for every facility manager. Facility managers need to be innovative in their contracting. Low-bid contracts are seldom appropriate, and partnering with our contractors and consultants while insisting that they perform if they are to continue working for our organization is a best practice.
• Good FM is based on good leadership of a proper organization.
• Facility managers need to have the same level of business skills as their management colleagues.
• Facility managers must know their business—both the FM business and the business they support.
• Although it is improving, FM continues to need better basic research and better application of both existing research and best practices.
• Every facility manager should have a facility master plan as a priority. Included should be a recapitalization plan covering at least ten years. These two efforts not only will be key to your management, but will show that you know the language of business and are participating in the business planning of an organization.
• Facility managers are in a position to influence how substantial organizational resources are spent. Conduct your business with the highest degree of ethics and a sense of stewardship.
• Sustainability, security, and emergency management are functions with great management and customer interest, which every FM must accommodate.
• Never before has there been the emphasis on cost that there is now, and facility managers, to be successful, must realize that fact.
• The FM professional associations as well as individual facility professionals should demonstrate and publicize that effective and efficient FM has a payoff for organizations.
Facility management, commonly abbreviated as FM, is still a fairly new business and management discipline in the private sector. In the public sector, however, it has been practiced as post engineering, public works, or plant administration for many years. In leased property, the profession is called property management or building operating management, although most of the required skills are the same as those needed in owned property. Outside of North America, until recently, FM functions were often subsumed deep in the administrative structure of both private and public sector organizations, if practiced at all. Growth around the globe has heightened the awareness that sustainment of facilities is required for longevity and efficient use.
The most recent definition of facility management is "a profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality of the built environment by integrating people, place, process, and technology." It is interesting to note that this newest definition highlights the importance of technology, which was lacking previously. Similar definitions from the European Union and other areas point to the need for standardization of the industry. An International Standards Organization (ISO) project is currently underway at this writing, to establish FM standards for use around the world. This attempt should help not only to standardize the definitions and meaning of facility management, but also to bring broader awareness of the field and its value. Exhibit 1-1 defines facility management in terms of commonly performed functions and subfunctions. This is more understandable to someone new to the profession. Every facility manager will be involved in managing the first fifteen of those functions either as the principal manager or as a major supporting manager. General administrative services (listed below) tend to be managed by facility managers in very small organizations and by FMs, often vice presidents of facilities or administration, in very large organizations.
In North America, security and emergency management has become much more important to both the public and private sector since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Companies and governments anywhere ignore these functions at their own peril.
Sustainability, security, and emergency management have also edged to the front of the facility manager's priorities. A recent International Facility Management Association (IFMA) Foundation-funded study showed that finance dominated facility manager's concerns.
Calling facility management "asset management," the National Research Council (NRC), in its 2008 report, Core Competencies for Federal Facilities Asset Management Through 2020, lists competencies for future managers that are highly coincident with those we list in Exhibit 1-1. We recommend that yet another change of terminology, from facility management to asset management, will only serve to confuse our employers and the business community. We suggest that in addition to the NRC revisiting and changing terminology, the use of "asset management" should be reserved for major infrastructure assets such as federal, state, and local assets such as bridges, highways, electrical grid systems, water systems, and similar major infrastructure.
Defining the many FM functions becomes very important because they form the framework for maturity in the industry and its professional development, research, and professional competency testing. For example, IFMA has organized the functions into "competencies" around which it designs all of its professional programs. These eleven competencies form the basis of standardization and encapsulate all of the many functions required in FM. These competencies are:
1. The Nature of Facility Management
2. Emergency preparedness and business
3. Environmental stewardship and sustainability
4. Finance and business
5. Human factors
6. Leadership and strategy
7. Operations and maintenance
8. Project management
9. Quality
10. Real estate and property management
11. Technology
International standardization is one step that may help to bridge understanding and business opportunity. Facility management embraces the concepts of cost-effectiveness, productivity improvement, efficiency, and employee quality of life. In practice, these concepts often seem to be in conflict. For example, many facility managers find themselves sinking in the quicksand of diminishing knowledge worker productivity, placed at the precipice of office air-quality problems, or embroiled in waste management issues that predate their employments. Providing customer responsive services balanced with unrelenting cost cuts is a monumental challenge. Employee expectations and concerns almost always come before clear-cut technical or financial solutions. Often there are no set answers—only management decisions that must be made. It is this constant yin and yang of FM: to balance the needs of the organization against the financial restrictions required to allow the operational units of the business to expand and grow.
Some say that Edward A. Murphy (of Murphy's law: "If something can go wrong, it will go wrong") must have been a facility manager. Every good facility manager is a good reactive manager because reaction is a fact of life in delivering services. However, facility managers cannot allow themselves to be totally reactive managers. That approach can downplay planning, even though planning is the key to cost-effectiveness.
A facility manager who does not have a philosophy regarding the position, the FM department, and the facilities managed cannot provide the leadership needed by the company.
The Development of Facility Management
Many managers of large and complex facilities, including municipal public works directors, facility managers of national or international corporations, and collegiate plant administrators, learned how to manage large facilities in the military. The Association of Facilities Engineering (AFE) and the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers (formerly the Association of Physical Plant Administrators [APPA]) were among the first to organize disparate professionals with diverse backgrounds into professional associations. Early in the 1980s the Facility Management Institute spun off the National Facility Management Association (NFMA). Then Canadian facility managers became interested, so the NFMA was converted to the International Facility Management Association (IFMA).
Currently, the Building Owners and Managers Association (BOMA) and the Building Owners and Managers Institute (BOMI) in the United States have similarly organized and served property and building managers. Professionals devoted to real estate acquisition, management, and disposal have similarly organized. In general, the goal of all these organizations is to inform and educate their membership, provide professional designation(s), research their areas of expertise, and hold networking events that bring together their members and the vendors who service them. Some lobby politically, and some do not.
Within the U.S. federal government there have been sporadic attempts to organize its facility managers. Uniformed services and their retirees have come together as part of the Society of American Military Engineers (SAME). The Federal Facilities Council, part of the U.S. National Research Council, is not truly a professional membership association, but serves as a focal point for federal facility managers.
Other associations in many parts of the world have come together to assemble facility professionals to gain networking and education, and to share opportunities. Many of these organizations collaborate with neighbors in larger networks such as the EuroFM Network or European and Scandinavian country associations. A growing awareness of the shared interests of facility professionals is being seen around the globe.
Perceptions of the Profession and Its Professionals
Often facility managers, in both the public and private sectors, either do not realize or fail to understand how they are perceived within their organizations, which is a major problem for the profession and for individual facility managers. Historically, facility managers and their departments have been viewed as:
• Caretakers
• Naysayers
• Advocates for employee welfare
• Controllers
• Employee efficiency multipliers
• Heavily reliant on the purchasing
• Service providers
• Producers of voluminous policies and regulations
• Project handlers
• Majors consumers of the administrative budget department
Not all of these attributes are bad, but the business and government worlds are changing and so must we. Here are important business and cultural trends that have radically changed the private and public sectors:
Business Trends
• Focus on cost reduction and shareholder value
• Internationalization
• Rise of the chief financial officer
• Outsourcing
• Rising cost, particularly in the construction area
• The growth of E-commerce
• The integration of facility resource information into corporate business data
• Emphasis on speed of delivery
• Improved information technology particularly in the areas of architecture/ engineering planning and work management
• Increased use of public/private partnerships
• The importance of the knowledge economy
• New ways of working collaboratively and remotely, enabled by mobile technology
• New sustainability initiatives and targets
• Concern about security and emergency preparedness
Cultural Trends
• Aging of the population
• Lack of skilled tradesmen
• An increasingly diverse workforce
• Environmental concerns
• Lack of loyalty and trust in institutions
• Generational perceptions of the value/use/importance of the workplace
• Concern for better ethics and stewardship
A new facility manager profile has emerged based on these trends. The facility manager is no longer focused on a narrow technical field where the language is "FM speak," but now has the expanded viewpoint of a business leader who helps the organization take a strategic view of its facilities and their impact on productivity. Here are the characteristics of a successful facility manager in today's business environment:
• Business leader
• Strategic business planner and implementer
• Resource obtainer
• Financial manager
• Spokesperson and advocate
• Agile purchaser, lessor, and contractor with a major regard for ethics
• Information manager
• Environmentalist
• Networker
• Mentor
• Innovator
• Risk taker
• Survivor
Having said this, an Aberdeen Group study of the industry states, "Although real estate and facilities life-cycle management has been viewed as playing a more strategic role within enterprises, the ultimate impact of these groups (facility and building management) is in question." This should give us all pause. Are we really projecting the management image that we want? Why isn't FM viewed as being as strategic as human resources and information technology, for instance?
Facility managers who thrive in the current environment have shed the role of technician and have adopted the characteristics shown in the above list. Unfortunately, not everyone agrees (or has "gotten the word"), and some facility managers think they can survive purely on their technical expertise. The professional organizations are trying to train their members to be better business-people and communicators. Clinging to the comfort zone of the boiler room and the work management center will relegate facility managers to a lesser role and reaction mode—if they are able to retain their positions at all. The evolution of FM provides important clues to the education needed for those in professional organizations and university FM degrees.
The Development of a Facility Management Philosophy
Considering both the trends and the expectations of facility managers, we have developed the following philosophy for the professional practice of FM, and we recommend it to every facility manager:
• Facility management is a business function, and the actions of facility managers have financial and organizational impacts.
• Safety is always the first concern followed by legality, cost, and customer service.
• An FM staff member should be directly responsible for every physical asset and function.
• There is a cost of ownership of facilities; it is the facility manager's task to ensure that management understands that cost.
• Facility managers should be cost-conscious in everything they do, and should capture all costs in this analysis.
• If something looks like a good idea, investigate whether anyone else has tried it. If it works in one place, it can be adapted to another—this is the essence of benchmarking.
• A good, commonsense decision beats "paralysis by analysis."
• The budget should be the chief management information tool. Put effort into its preparation and format, and then monitor its execution carefully.
• Every physical asset should be under appropriate life-cycle management.
• When an outside consultant is used, take care and time in defining expectations.
• Clarify life-cycle and sustainable design and operational intents before launching new projects.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Facility Management Handbook by Kathy O. Roper, Richard P. Payant. Copyright © 2014 Kathy O. Roper and Richard P. Payant. Excerpted by permission of AMACOM.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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