What is facilities management - Making the theory practical

Facilities Managers tend to be very practical people. And by this I don’t mean that they are not intellectual, technically enlightened or big picture thinkers. Just that in and amongst all the theory and concepts we make sure that the light bulb is on – in every sense of the phrase.

Many people feel that Facilities Management is very “nebulous”. They don’t understand the concept - what we actually do - are we technical managers or do we just look after services and on and on. It starts becoming rather confusing and when explaining the concept in my day to day environment I believe that we need to keep it simple because actually, Facilities Management is a very simple concept.

Let’s look at a couple of definitions and try and break it down.

BIFM – Facilities Management is the integration of multi-disciplinary activities within the built environment and the management of their impact upon people and the workplace.
IFMA - Facility management is a profession that encompasses multiple disciplines to ensure functionality of the built environment by integrating people, place, process and technology.
SAFMA - Facilities management is an enabler of sustainable enterprise performance through the whole life management of productive workplaces and effective business support services.
And the most simple yet lengthy version from WIKIPEDIA (very popular online encyclopaedia) – In business, facility management is the management of buildings and services. These services are sometimes considered to be divided into hard services and 'soft services'; hard services includes such things as ensuring that a building's air conditioning is operating efficiently, reliably, safely and legally; soft services includes such things as ensuring that the building is cleaned properly and regularly or monitoring the performance of contractors (e.g. builders, electricians).

It is the role of facility management to ensure that everything is available for the other staff in an organisation to do their work. Facility management may range from the small scale (e.g. a school caretaker or janitor) to the large scale. Some facility management companies have grown to simply provide environments which other organisations may rent on demand in order to do business in a 'hotel' environment.

So how does Afroteq defines Facilities Management?

Well we believe that everything can be shown in a picture (must be the technical side of our business!!) so we have defined it as follows:

Facilities Management is the management of those facilities services which are required to meet the needs present where ‘people’, ‘processes’ (including technology) and ‘places’ overlap in organizations.

Simple really, it’s not “building maintenance”, or “cleaning and security” or even “property management”, which are some of the phrases used by people when you discuss FM.

Rather, as the old traditional theory of management puts it – it is the Planning, Organising, Directing and Controlling of People, Place and Process.

The key to simplifying and demystifying Facilities Management is the word “management” i.e. a Facilities Manager must be just that – a manager. However, this does not negate the fact that in many facilities (i.e. airports, electricity companies etc) a certain degree of sophisticated technical competence is required coupled with excellent management skills.

So to make Facilities Management practical consider that the important thing is not whether or not you are able to fix a light bulb but – how you ensure that it is fixed and what knowledge and skills you use in the process whilst understanding the importance of the fixed light bulb as part of the bigger organisational picture.

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