Federal Facilities Beyond the 1990s: Ensuring Quality in an Era of Limited Resources Summary of a Symposium (1997) / Chapter Skim
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Pages 1-10
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For all these reasons, managers have been seeking ways to restn~cture their organizations and reengineer their operations, to best design, acquire, operate, and maintain quality facilities in the demanding new environment. Toward addressing these challenges, the standing Committees on Design and Construction, and Organization and Administration of the Federal Facilities Council convened a two-day symposium, May 30-3 1, 1996, to hear federal, academic, and private sector representatives report on their reengineering of facilities management organizations, current trends in their own arenas, and their experience with novel organizational and process solutions.
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In the federal sector, recent legislative and executive actions notably, the Federal Acquisition Streamlining Act of 1994, the Federal Acquisition Reform Act of 1995, and Vice President Gore's National Performance Review have prompted federal innovations and experiments that are widely viewed as the greatest transformations in federal government in the last 30 years or more. Several speakers suggested that facilities managers should recognize that changes in operating procedures and functions will continue into the foreseeable future and should incorporate plans to manage such change into their long-term strategic planning.
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The open communication encouraged in construction contracting partnerships, despite its potential legal difficulties, was reportedly one of the factors behind the success of several difficult projects. Several new streamlined requests for proposals and procurement processes also proved highly successful, according to the reports.
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If the first two investments are leveraged to produce a better quality workplace, it is possible that employee productivity can be greatly enhanced at very low relative cost. For example, if a ~ percent improvement in performance is obtained by investing 10 percent more in construction, the return on that investment is 100 percent.
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Unlike the private sector, federal agencies do not review project and building operating costs relative to program costs. One speaker suggested that federal agencies should begin to analyze real estate as a production factor in the broader scheme of providing public service, while another suggested that facilities be considered part of an organazation's investment portfolio.
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A charrette was successfully used to establish design guidelines for the problematic facade of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, which must serve as both the visitors' entrance of a major monumental building and the service entrance for the regular passage of industrial equipment.
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As in the case above, some of these success stories depended on identifying a limited number of very carefully chosen technical selection criteria, including the past performance of the contractor andior architect. According to the symposium reports, recent acquisition reform laws have provided other powerful tools for quality project delivery at lower cost as well.
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In the design programs of GSA's Public Buildings Service, postoccupancy evaluations have been used to validate design criteria, to ensure that users' needs are met. Many speakers, representing private and public organizations alike, emphasized that business process reengineering should be based on a rational process, such as TQM, to avoid well-intentioned, but sometimes unsuccessful, attempts to control costs.
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show more immediate promise, according to one symposium report: space and asset management, strategic space planning, facilities/conditions assessment, and infrastructure support project communications. Such technologies permit data to be integrated among business units for efficiency, more efficient project management, the calculation of features (such as floor space and adjacency and trip space analyses)
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topics of interest included the management of renovations and smaller projects; these projects represent a large part of federal facilities management, will likely be of greater relative importance in the fiscally constrained future, and may offer special lessons in management. Finally, participants noted the value of the present exchange for their own roles in facility management, and suggested that a similar symposium be held in two years' tune, to exchange information again on new developments and practices.
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