This week’s post is the last of our series on the competencies within the FMO Maturity Model. Following up on the discussion of mission validation last week, this post takes a brief look at long-term planning. Both of these competencies address the question that frames organizational development efforts at Level 5: “How can I justify a budget increase,” as shown in the Table below.
Business Success and Long-term Planning
The goal of long-term planning is to make sure that the facilities infrastructure is suitable for planned business operations, given the future environment of opportunities and threats, as they are currently understood. In essence, the long-term business plan is the aggregation of a series of short-term plans, resulting in a plan itself that is more conceptual. This top-down, operational guidance includes vision statements and frames FMO goals in terms of mission support.
By Level 5, managers have begun to think about how the portfolio is tied to business success – the long-term plan is simply a framework for continuing this support. It is natural to be working with a lot of unknowns at this stage – or even the “best guesses” of leaders charged with choosing the path ahead, and guiding the organization down it. The planning time frame is three years or more, and the FMO’s main impact is likely to be focused on determining the best locations for future fixed assets and on longer term cost effectiveness. The FMO can be strategically valuable as a partner to the organization by providing the desired facility information in an integrated and fast way.
The FMO responds with its own business plan, except that instead of setting the objective in terms of profit and loss, the goals are more about mitigating potential constraints the portfolio may create, or finding leverage within the portfolio that allows the business to take advantage of future opportunities that are identified during the planning exercise. The FMO’s long-term plan makes the case for the people, funding, and technology resources that are required to support the business going forward. For facilities managers, job performance should be measured on execution of the FMO plan as well as their contributions to successful implementation of the overall business plan.
The Facility Life-Cycle
From an organizational development standpoint, by progressing through the earlier stages of the FMO Maturity Model, managers are already thinking in terms of the facility life-cycle, which can be summarized as: plan, design, construct, operate/maintain, and dispose; and they have a good understanding of the nature of the cost drivers in their portfolio at each life-cycle stage. The FMO Maturity Model foundation – such as the inventory and systems in place – will help ensure success in the planning role. For example, if the FMO’s role is focused solely on the life-cycle’s “operate/maintain” function, a key building block is to understand the condition of the facilities in the portfolio, whether they are buildings, utilities infrastructure, roads or parking, or even raw land.
As the facility management software market has emerged and evolved, these products are positioned to facilitate the FMO’s offering of this kind of support, merging life-cycle information and current status and condition, at the desired level of accuracy and detail. The FMO needs to be sure of how these internal customers will use the information, and to make sure that there is a mutual understanding of the data that is maintained and can be provided. Once that common perception is in place, the organization can begin to use the data to understand and address the constraints and opportunities within the portfolio.
Next Post
The next post in this series will take a look at the on-boarding process, thinking in terms of a facility manager joining a new place of employment, or taking on a new assignment. Drawing from a couple of books on the topic, we’ll take a look at their recommendations for assessing the new environment, diagnosing common business problems, and how make a business plan that will take the FMO forward under new leadership.
As always, thanks for reading the FM Notes from the Field blog, and thanks again to Steven and IWMSNews.com for hosting it. Please drop a note to me at jim.turner@iwmsnews.com if you would like more information on the material in these blog posts.
