Facility management (FM) is “a profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality of the built environment by integrating people, place, process, and technology.”
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.
Sustainability, security, and emergency management have also edged to the front of the facility manager’s priorities.
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. Communication
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
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.
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
Major 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
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