WHAT’S NEW? TOMORROW’S MORROW’S
W’S F A CI LI T I E S MANAGEMENT WHAT I LEARNT
THIS MONTH Liz Kentish
The other week, I was preparing an introductory session for a conference with an
associate.In this presentation we were including an activity to get everyone warmed up for the day.
The activity involved having a list of questions on two separate sheets of paper. There were two hundred people due to attend the conference, so that meant four hundred sheets of printed questions to be folded, taped and labeled.
When we were folding the sheets of paper, after the first ten, we worked out that there was a quicker way of preparing them. After thirty sheets, we found a quicker way still and by the time we were finishing we had the process down to a fine art.
This got me thinking about the way that the Management of companies sometimes come up with new ideas for the work that they do and then impose what they see as the way to do it. The new process gets under way and in many cases is not as smooth or speedy as they thought it would be.
What they should do is to ask the people who are actually doing the job, because no one else knows better how that work or process can be improved. Just like we were preparing the question sheets, the only way to work out the most effective method for a process is to actually do it and improve it as you go.
So, when you want to improve something, make sure to ask the person doing the job.
Graham Perry T TODAY , Head of Building
Intelligence for property services group Styles&Wood plc, explains why the rise of Prop
ech will help model more than construction projects.
The construction and property industry has long been behind the curve when it comes to using data to inform the design of projects. However, with the public sector’s edict for the adoption of BIM, and clients in other sectors starting to mirror the Government’s requirement, interest in Property Technology (PropTech) is growing across the built environment sector.
While BIM has been focussed primarily on planning new build projects, it has acted to galvanise property managers’ use of data, with more recognising that it can improve decision making. For those involved in estates planning, adopting technology and data could help to meet new challenges.
At a time when the trend for flexible working has made the office environment more fluid, it’s harder to monitor the need for space. Data has become increasingly valuable in providing a longer term view of how offices are used and helping to forecast how changes in a business’ headcount will create a need to either alter the design of a workspace or expand or reduce the footprint of its estate.
There’s a wealth of technology out there that can help estates managers better model the use of
16 | TOMORROW’S FM
their property estates. For example, Beacons, which are Bluetooth- enabled devices that can record details of the environment where they’re placed and can even map employee’s movements around an office. The devices can be attached to lanyards or utilise mobile phones, allowing estates managers to model the use of a working environment in the context of a variety of flexible- working patterns.
Gathering data in this way can help model areas that are over or underused, and assess whether there’s a need for more office accommodation, or if a simple design tweak could be more cost effective. Knowing this ahead of leasing events can help managers make informed decisions about their property estates.
Ultimately, the industry is heading towards the adoption of single IT platforms, which will include a variety of different modelling components - from BIM through to operational data - with each element able to influence the other. The government is already taking steps to make BIM prepared for this. New standards (PAS1192 and ISO5500) are benchmarking best practice when it comes to sharing a variety of estate and asset related data between different suppliers to create a more holistic view of a project. The next logical step will be for FM and estates teams to also feed in to this platform, giving firms a single overview of their property.
twitter.com/TomorrowsFM
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