Nate Erpestad, discusses common success factors, potential challenges and best practices in first generation Facilities Management (FM) outsourcing programs and their implementation.
Clients continue to ask us to support them in putting together an outsourcing relationship for the first time or bundling existing contracts that they have. Even though many companies are next gen, sometimes in the second, third or even fourth iteration of their contract, we still work with a lot of clients that are approaching this for the first time. We have a lot of lessons learned and a lot of background of things that we have seen go well or not so well to inform this process.
Making sure you have good executive sponsorship and, ensuring that there is a structured and organized approach to change management, with good engagement at all levels of the organization. When you hand over your FM operations and hire a supplier, or multiple suppliers for an FM program, the number one priority is to keep the facilities running. Whether that is manufacturing or offices, the occupants and users of those buildings have an expectation that things are going to work – the lights will be on, the bathrooms will be clean, factories will run with all the necessary support services, and there will be no business disruption.
The success factor is to make sure there is a way to keep in mind the programmatic things that need to be built prioritized, in parallel with keeping the lights on and keeping the bathrooms clean. What are the primary program elements that may or may not exist but are fragmented and need to be built along the way to ensure that the program has some staying power and has the structures it needs, to be able to report on what is going on, to govern itself and to solve issues when they arise.
It is important to make sure that there is alignment on expectations on what is business as usual, versus building out aspects of the program that go above and beyond those day-to-day FM activities. This includes responding to stakeholder requests, putting out fires, creating a plan to build programmatic things, making sure the resourcing, meetings and governance are there to support the program. Additionally, clients must allow room for iteration, making sure that all the things that are not planned for but are intuitively known are put on paper. That is probably the biggest category that we could point clients to in building a generation one facilities management outsourcing program.
