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The Science of Facility Management: A Balancing Act
There was an article in the New York Times this past summer under the section on Ideas & Trends titled “Things Fall Apart, but Some Big Old Things Don't.” The writer was in part addressing the Minnesota interstate bridge collapse, but actually was putting this tragic event in the context of a bigger picture familiar to most practitioners of Facility Management, namely, how do we balance many of the facets of our business that both drives us to build more new things but also to constantly assess the condition and life expectancy of all the old stuff we already have to manage.
The Merriam-Webster's definition of balance suggests a “means of judging or deciding.” How one decides to use a certain finite amount of resources to maintain a facility is often driven by a life cycle analysis, which prioritizes assets based on years of service. But as the “Times'” article suggests, such an analysis can't be applied dogmatically to all infrastructure issues, or we'd have long ago replaced the Brooklyn Bridge, when it's over design has in fact kept it serviceable long after it's 19th century contemporaries have disappeared from the landscape.
The profession of Facility Management doesn't demand that we replace everything as soon as it's years of service have abruptly ended, but instead requires us to constantly and expertly assess the condition of the assets we are given to manage. There will always be a demand to produce innovative and new “monuments” to corporate and government identity, but the challenge of managing a bigger portfolio just puts more focus on inspection and assessment of everything on an ongoing basis.
How are FMs going to meet the new reality of taking on the new, while preserving the old? The way the profession always has, by bringing to the forefront the life cycle analysis that identifies for the board room what resources are needed going forward to preserve and protect what we already own, while making room for the new. The country now has to face the same issues as we try to determine, especially in wake of the interstate bridge collapse, how we analyze and manage the ongoing transportation infrastructure that we've come to rely on. It's been almost 60 years and many billions of dollars later since FDR first took a crude map of the US and drew four lines representing the most basic plan for an interstate highway system.
A comprehensive look at these issues can be found on the American Society of Civil Engineers' web site, www.asce.org; under the headline, “Small Steps for Big Improvements in America's Failing Infastructure.”
by Mark Mankin, Coordinator, University of Delaware
