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FM Notes from the Field: An Introduction

Today iwmsnews.com publishes a guest post by Jim Turner about FM and IWMS. This post is part of the series: FM Notes from the Field which will be published on a weekly basis here. I personally asked Jim for an introduction post and he did a wonderful job! I am really looking forward to your opinion about it.

Dear Readers,

Over the last 15 years or so, I’ve been working as a management consultant to real estate and facilities management organizations.  Thinking back on that work with public and private sector clients on 60-plus engagements, it’s hard to summarize a single, consistent theme or goal for them all:  some were oriented purely towards cost reduction, some were about the challenges new leadership faced or performance improvements, and others were about developing high-level real estate and facilities strategies. 

A few years ago, Stormy Friday, an expert on leadership and organizational development in this field, started a blog at Facilities Net with the following quote:

“[Facilities Management (FM)] is not a precise science and for every type of institution we have worked with…the “corporate” philosophy about FM varies.  Some institutions believe FM should be the resident guru on everything from real estate and transportation planning to infrastructure and energy management and be a strategic partner in institutional decision making. 

“Other institutions view the FM function as strictly operational and have a limited perspective on the role FM plays within the institution. While there is no right or wrong perspective, in order to create an FM organization that works within an individual institutional setting, it is important to have a clear understanding of what the institutional expectations are. These institutional expectations create the platform for the construction of the FM organization’s service delivery model.”

At least, on the face of it, this experience suggests that there isn’t a common element to the challenges of being an effective FM Organization, or FMO.  However, over the last two or three years, I have begun to see a way that they do fit together:  borrowing from the “maturity model” concept that the Project Management Institute and other organizations use as conceptual building blocks for their disciplines, there are at least ten key facilities management competencies.  These competencies, in turn, can be enhanced and strengthened by the offerings and capabilities of the growing Integrated Workplace Management Systems (IWMS) discipline. 

An increasing number of practitioners are embracing this competency-based approach.  The purpose of this “FM Notes from the Field” blog is to outline these core competencies within a maturity model framework, and to highlight how IWMS can contribute within that framework to continuous improvement for FMOs.  The blog will draw from industry news, supplemented by “in-the-field” experience.
 
So, while we’ll be talking about industry trends, and we hope that the insights we share prove useful to you, you’ll need to keep in mind the experience you have at your organizations.  There’s never a great, one-size-fits-all cookie-cutter approach for FMOs – in the end, you’ll need to make decisions about which ones will work at your organization, and what sort of adaptations will ensure success in your environment. 
Incidentally, the core competencies we’ll be looking at in future posts include:  inventory baselines, management policies, organization and systems, processes, performance metrics, performance improvements, short-term planning, mission/strategy validation, and long-term planning.  Most future posts will be focused on a single one of these topics. 

Thanks to Steven Hanks for the opportunity to “guest blog” here at IWMSNews.com – reader comments are welcomed in response to these posts, or you can send them directly to me at jamesturnerjr@aol.com – please just be sure to mention IWMSNews in the subject line or your email.