Six facility metrics worth tracking, and four that are not

Facility dashboards fill up with numbers that nobody acts on. The test for a metric is simple: name the decision it changes. If you cannot, it is decoration.

Worth tracking

• •Preventive work past its date, by building. Changes where you put people this week.
• •Median time per round, by workflow. Changes whether the schedule is achievable.
• •Repeat faults within ninety days. Changes whether you fix the cause or the symptom.
• •Requests without a first response. Changes how a tenant feels about you.
• •Proportion of finished work with evidence attached. Changes how an audit goes.
• •Open problems older than thirty days. Changes what gets escalated.

Mostly decoration

• •Total work orders closed. Rewards closing small jobs and says nothing about the building.
• •Average time to close. Dragged around by a handful of jobs waiting on parts.
• •Cost per square foot in isolation. Meaningless without knowing what condition it bought.
• •Technician utilisation. Optimising it produces busy people and worse buildings.

One rule

Prefer the median to the average for anything about duration. Facility work has a long tail: one job that waited eleven weeks for a part will drag an average somewhere useless, while the median tells you what a normal day looks like.