What facility management actually covers

Facility management is keeping buildings working for the people in them. In practice that splits into four areas: the building systems, the services people notice, the space itself, and the paperwork that proves it is all safe and legal.

Hard services: the building systems

Heating, cooling, ventilation, electrical, water, drainage, lifts, fire systems, building fabric and roofs. This is where the maintenance schedule lives and where most of the money goes.

Soft services: what people notice

Cleaning, waste, security, reception, catering, grounds, post and moves. Nobody thanks you when these work and everybody notices within an hour when they do not, which is the opposite of the hard services problem.

Space: what the building is being used for

Who sits where, how full the building is, moves and changes, and whether the space still suits the work. This is the area that has changed most in the last five years and the one most often measured with data nobody trusts.

Compliance: proving it is safe

Fire, water safety, electrical testing, gas, lifting equipment, asbestos, access. Distinct from maintenance because the intervals are not yours to choose and the evidence has an audience outside your organisation.

Where the boundaries usually go wrong

• •Cleaning finds a fault and has no way to report it, so the fault waits for a technician to walk past
• •Security holds the only record of an out-of-hours incident, in a different book
• •Space changes happen without anybody telling maintenance, so the plant room serving that floor is now serving a data room
• •Compliance is tracked by a different person in a different spreadsheet from the maintenance schedule

Every one of these is a handover between two groups who use different systems, and every one of them is fixed by the same thing: one place where a problem can be reported, by anybody, in twenty seconds.

What a good week looks like

Planned work mostly happens as planned. Faults are reported by the people who see them rather than discovered later. Late work is a specific number somebody is looking at. Nothing statutory is close to its expiry date without somebody knowing. And when the building surprises you, which it will, the record tells you when that equipment was last touched and by whom.

The measure that matters most

Not cost per square foot, and not work orders closed. How much of your week was chosen by you rather than by the building. That ratio is the honest measure of whether a facilities operation is being run or is running you.