M2_COMPETENCIES

STRATEGIES
AR PAUL ONG
Facility Management
AR138-2
MITL
SERVICES
MANAGEMENT
REAL ESTATE
Analysis of the facilities management role suggests
the following principal competencies are relevant
to the job;
• building and workplace • compliance – legal and regulatory
management – building maintenance requirements,
and performance, environmental
services, workspace design and in particular for the health and safety
management, technology and of users of
communications (ICT)
• financial management – buildings and staff; and
accounting, purchasing and supply,
budgets, business cases • general management –
• service delivery – communication, leadership, strategy,
account/customer relationship change management,
management, delivery process and
systems, contracts, performance procurement and risk management.
metrics
Principal Competencies
These competencies are covered by the various available
courses and in addition, Continuous Professional
Development courses (CPD) supply the necessary
knowledge updates, particularly in the legal and regulatory
area, which are essential to the orderly and legal
management of a facilities operation.
Personal Qualities and Skills

• Technical knowledge of building service

• The ability to manage a complex workload
• Customer Management Skills
• Legal and Health & Safety knowledge
• Problem solving skills
• IT Skills
• Good spoken and written skills
• The ability to manage large budgets
Suitable previous careers include:

• Hospitality • Block Management

• Cleaning/Caretaking • Surveying
• Engineering • Business or Finance
• Business Services • Security
• Asset Management • Catering
• Trades – Electrical, • Land Management
• Plumbing, Heating & • Property Development
• Ventilation etc.
Those skills considered most important are:

• • Customer service—40 percent

• • Operations and maintenance—31 percent
• • Communications—29 percent
• • Project management—21 percent
• • General management—19 percent
• • Financial—17 percent
• • Strategic planning—15 percent
• • All other topics—under 10 percent
 The Big Twelve: twelve major actions that
every facility manager should take:
• 1. Conduct and regularly update an
assessment of both physical facilities
and operations.
• 2. Measure! Measure! Measure!
• 3. Develop a facilities master plan from
which all midyear and annual planning
derives. As part of the master plan,
include a recapitalization plan covering
at least ten years.
• . 4. Get your organizational structure
right. Don’t confuse staffing with
organization.
5. Recognize that in all but a few special
cases, staffing is a blend of staff,
contractors, and consultants, in order
to minimize cost and maximize
flexibility.
6. Institute a customer-based quality
program that uses multiple means to
obtain customer input.
 The Big Twelve: twelve major actions that
every facility manager should take:
• 7. Determine the information you need
in order to manage, and then develop
automation to produce it for you. Your
FM information system should be
budget-based.
• 8. Institute facility business planning
that can feed into company business
planning even if you are initially
rebuffed by company planners. Use the
company’s criteria and systems for
making financial decisions.
• 9. Show results! Companies don’t pay
for good intentions and plans—only for
results. View your department as a
business within your company.
• 10. Use innovative contracting. For
other than simple contracting situations,
low-bid contracting will result in
unsatisfactory results. Partner with your
contractors and consultants but demand
that they perform if they are to continue
to work with you.
• 11. Have a public relations plan each
year that targets each of the
constituencies that you have identified.
• 12. Get management commitment to
good FM. You, and you alone, can obtain
it. It is worth the effort.
STRATEGIES
 • This competence falls to the facilities manager
where there is no real estate function in the
organization. Where the function does exist, it is
essential that the facilities and real estate teams
work in partnership to deliver the
accommodation strategy and maintained and
Real estate serviced workspace. The task involves the
management alignment of accommodation and business
strategies and the allocation of appropriate
and strategy accommodation assets to meet operational
business plans. The management of projects,
preparation of business cases, real estate asset
management, leasing and transactional
management are all part of this overall
competency.
 • This is essentially the ‘hard’ and ‘soft FM’
operation involving the planned and
Accommodation managed preventative maintenance of the
accommodation portfolio, maintaining
operations and building services and systems, landscaping
maintenance and upgrading, designing and redesigning
workplaces. This will include linkage with IT
specialists to create optimum working
environments. The cleaning and catering
services, along with many others, are also
included (see references in ‘Key terms’ at
Appendix 3)
 • Many of the operations previously described
will involve projects of various sizes and so
will require design and programming,
Project procurement and management as works
management proceed, as well as move management and
relocations. This competence is important in
the delivery of quality services to the
organisation.
 • The facilities manager is called upon to manage
operating costs and capital budgets and control the
bottomline finances for the accommodation
Finance and portfolio. It is also an imperative to understand how
FM decisions will impact both financially and
business operationally across the organisation. The ability to
construct business cases, and to analyse and audit
costs to avoid waste and reduce overheads, without
compromising quality, is part of the key competence.
To reiterate, the activities under the control of the
facilities manager often represent the second highest
overhead of an organisation. Good financial skills and
budget management are, therefore, a pre-requisite
to success in the role.
 • The quality of facilities services is vital to the
delivery of a fully supportive operation. The
ability to deliver and maintain standards at
an affordable cost will depend on
establishing quality assurance and
Quality performance measurement systems. The
benchmarking of the facilities function,
together with the regular assessment of
customer experience, are essential features
of facilities delivery improvement.
 • An understanding of, and interest in, ICT and
related issues is essential for the facilities
Technology manager. ICT is a vital tool in the
management of the facilities function and is
(ICT) a key to the success of the organisation as a
whole. The integration of ICT, workspace
design, flexible workstyles and flexible work
delivery styles (in conjunction with HR
specialists) are operational imperatives for
the organisation and, therefore, for the
facilities manager.
 • It is fundamental for the facilities manager to
understand the issues of productive workspace
and layouts from an occupier/user perspective,
along with the ergonomics of workstations,
health and safety, security of staff and visitors
Human and the HR, contract, workstyle, workplace
resources implications of flexible employment contracts.
Understanding and accommodating the
(HR) requirements of a modern flexible workplace,
including the organization, health and safety,
regulatory and legislative environment are
equally as important as delivering technical and
process related services.
 • The need to identify, document, plan and
execute a continuity plan based on a cross-
Business organization risk assessment is a long-standing
requirement for the facilities manager. This
continuity and competence includes having an FM continuity
risk plan and the processes, resources and back up in
place to manage service loss and restoration in
any circumstances. In some sectors, this
competence includes the establishment and
management of accommodation which can be
‘fired-up’ and occupied should principal
locations become unusable.
 • The facilities manager should have regard to the
regulatory and legislative backdrop regarding
sustainability when advising on the acquisition
of buildings and in the setting of servicing plans
along with the organization’s in-house strategy
on environmental and sustainability issues. The
facilities team will be expected to mitigate, as
Sustainability far as possible, the negative environmental
impacts of the organization’s portfolio of
accommodation using technical solutions and
management techniques, which will improve
the working environment of occupiers and
minimize the environmental impact of the
accommodation.
 • Much more than technical skill is needed to
deliver the organization-wide accommodation
Leadership and and servicing strategies demanded by large
organizations. The facilities professional should
change be prepared to lead, influence, motivate and
management manage people throughout the organization at
all levels. In addition, the change management
that is required to move the organization
forward may well be workstyle or
accommodation led, so the facilities manager
needs these skills to gain agreement and
cooperation from others.
 • The facilities manager must be a good
communicator, successfully putting the
strategy and business case message across,
persuading, negotiating and influencing
everyone throughout the organization as
Communication well as external suppliers and consultants.
Successfully ‘selling’ the benefits of the
occupational and service offering will be a
large part of the delivery of supportive
business space.
The • These standards have pan European
application and while not having global
development ‘reach’, are certainly used as the basis for
producing standards elsewhere. While
of standards standards are in the main voluntary in terms
for facilities of compliance, they do form the basis of
governmental and legal assessments in
management appropriate circumstances. They also form
part of the considerable amount of
information which is available to facilities
managers to assist with the wide variety of
duties they are called upon to perform.
ABBREVIATIONS
ABBREVIATIONS
ABBREVIATIONS
The development of standards
for facilities management
• BS EN 15221-5
• Guidance on Facilities Management Processes

• BS EN 15221-6
• Area and Space Measurement in Facilities Management

• BS EN 15221-7
• Guidelines for Performance Benchmarking in Facilities Management.
The development of standards
for facilities management

• BS EN 15221-1 BS EN 15221-3
• Facilities Management: Guidance on Quality in Facilities
terms and definitions Management

BS EN 15221-4
• BS EN 15221-2 Taxonomy, Classification and
• Guidance on How to Structures in Facilities Management
Prepare Facility
Management Agreements