FM Notes from the Field: Short-term Improvements
In “FM Notes from the Field“, industry veteran Jim Turner focuses on the Facilities Management Organization (FMO) maturity model and IWMS. This week his focus is on the short-term improvements.
Before last week’s break, we had covered the first couple of steps in the FMO Maturity Model before concluding with the introduction of the new graphic illustration of the model that Steven Hanks, our host here at IWMSNews.com, put together.
This week, we move on to Level 3 of the model, where managers will have arrived at the place in the development of their organizations where thoughts begin to turn to short-term organizational, process, and business models, leading to a focus on the assessment and metrics competencies.
It is likely that management completed an organizational assessment at the start of the maturity model effort, and somewhere along the way, condition assessments may have been completed as part of Level 1 of the model. These are important steps, and they get to the bottom line: the assessment competency is based upon knowing your FM organization’s capabilities and capacity, understanding how to create improvement opportunities, and creating implementation plans.
As an example of how to apply the assessment competency, I’d like to draw from a past effort with a government agency that was working to improve its asset management processes. We mapped the engagement into five steps, highlighted in the graphic below:
The agency was interested in the potential of using the inventory and asset management components of its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, so Step 1 included an assessment of overall readiness for taking this step. We broke that part of the project down into five sub-steps that would allow better visibility into the data they had available, followed by a gap analysis between existing processes and those required by the ERP, and then revisions to the project plan for rolling out the ensuing steps.
Specifically, the five sub-steps were: identify existing inventory data; identify existing facility condition data; assess completeness of this data compared to ERP requirements; develop guidance and protocols for addressing identified gaps or other needs; and update the project roll-out plan. We’ll skip the details of the rest of the project, although a brief discussion of Step 5 activities will be part of next week’s post about the metrics competency; however, the Step 1 approach – “assess-analyze-plan-improve” – is the heart of the assessment competency, providing managers with the background they need to make the necessary improvements to their businesses.
Thanks for reading the FM Notes from the Field blog, and thanks again to Steven and IWMSNews.com for hosting it. Meanwhile, if you would like more details on the references mentioned in any of the posts, drop a note to me at jim.turner@iwmsnews.com and I will send a reading list. Best regards and see you next week!
