Quality in facilities management
by Gerald Davis & Françoise Szigeti »
Quality in facilities management (FM) relates to how architecture and interior design work in practice, since FM is responsible for the Whole Life Cycle Management (WLCM) of the facility. The value of architecture to an enterprise relates to the capability of a facility to meet the stated and implied requirements at the time of delivery and over the period of use, at an affordable cost that the client is willing to pay.
How does this get done? By ensuring that all the requirements for the project are well documented, include on-going costs and performance-in-use, not just first costs and move-in requirements, and are presented in such a way that the design team can validate and verify that the design and the facility respond to these requirements. This is the core of the QM process for project delivery and for ‘quality’ in FM.
The FM group looks after the assets during use. It is the group that takes delivery of the facility from the design and construction team. The FM group deals day-to-day with the user groups. It is in the front line. It gets the complaints. It is asked to cut on-going costs, energy consumption, and the use of other resources. It has to provide more with less. It deals with code-compliance and environmental matters. It knows what works and what does not work because of its hands-on experience.
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Chapter 8.5 in Managing Quality in Architecture states that the chapter is a summary of a “definitive paper” on the topic. In fact, the final version of Davis & Szigeti’s paper is printed in full in the book. You can still download that chapter here.
Read the chapter: MQA Pt8.5 by downloading below.
For a related paper, see Dr. Penny Burns’ contributions on Quality in Asset Management