FM OPINION
THE DIARISTS
DON’T LET YOUR KPI COUNT GET OUT OF CONTROL
is an FM consultant
multitude of KPIs seems to continue unabated. Yet if there is one thing that will stop contract management working effectively, it is having too many KPIs to consider. Yes, you need to measure to be able to manage, but if you are measuring too much you can’t manage it at all and it becomes a meaningless chore. Performance indicators are fine as long as they are kept relevant to the contract as they are an essential part of managing and improving performance. In essence you can have as many performance indicators as you like as long as
The subject of key performance indicators (KPIs) has been on my mind again in the last week or two and, once again, the obsession with having a
“KPIS SHOULD BE ABOUT THE FUTURE; THEY SHOULD BE A SMALL GROUP OF MEASURES THAT DRIVE PERFORMANCE FORWARD”
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JOHN BOWEN
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you don’t create an industry out of monitoring them. They have to be cost-effective or they are pointless. Things go wrong when the performance indicators that you see as key proliferate – if they are the key indicators they should actually be the vital ones. The right number is fluid, but I’d suggest that you should never get into double figures; if you do, you probably have deeper issues to address. Think about your car dashboard. You will have a couple of big dials, a couple of small ones and some warning lights and, in most cases, one of the big dials is only there for show. You are mainly using your speedometer, fuel and temperature gauges. These are your KPIs and if one of the lights comes on you get someone to look at the problem. In the case of a multi-service contract I can understand a desire for each service stream to have its
own KPIs; that makes perfect sense as long as those KPIs are managed at a team level and so, for example, the security team are not going to be concerned, at least directly, with the level of food waste nor will the catering team be concerned with preventing dubious access. But keep those KPIs at a team level and don’t aggregate them upwards to contract management levels because at that stage you should be focusing on high-level issues. Measuring performance is a study of the past and too often people become fixated on that. The measures that you have as KPIs should be about the future; they should be a small group of measures that drive performance forward. If you can keep that as your focus then you take a chore and unleash a powerful motivational force that can bring real change.
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Unworkessence
Forging a new future for FM
Workessence, Neil Usher Two hundred and thirty-four posts on from 8 October 2011, Workessence is standing down. It may be temporary, it may be permanent, I haven’t decided. I used to love writing here, but of late that excitement has dwindled. The “flat blog” feels flatter than ever – swamped by the deluge of unfilterable dirge bubbling from every crevice of LinkedIn. To paraphrase a line from The Incredibles – when everyone’s a blogger, no one will be. I’ve exhausted the inclination or need to talk about millennials (no different from the rest of us), engagement (a lost sock), robots (if they have jobs, we’ll have different ones), productivity (a fish looking for a hook), the war for talent (for when there’s absolutely nothing else left to say), work being something you do and not somewhere you go, trust (it’s both), smartworking (a consultant fabrication), the tyranny of cool (a sterile airbrushed hell), professional bodies (self-defeating prophecies)) and any other issues that are only issues because we talk about them relentlessly. Creating fantastic workplaces has never been more attainable if we would just stop over-complicating, over-analysing and obfuscating. As Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin says in Nausea, “one has to choose, to live or to tell”. I’m giving the telling a break. Read this full article at www.tinyurl.com/zmax6kh
Louise Gosling, The FM frontline When we set out to rationalise the NHS Property Services FM contracts eight months ago, many were sceptical. Scaling down over 2,000 separate contracts and all the inconsistencies they entail to a handful of standardised relationships had never been achieved on this scale. We reached our deadline and exceeded expectations. How? By thinking and acting strategically. To be treated strategically, you have to behave strategically. Until now the market has been too fragmented to behave in a unified way. But with rationalisation, we are in a position to influence estates strategy to achieve better outcomes. Before starting, we negotiated with our outsourced contractors to agree a co-terminus date. I made sure a range of businesses were able to tender, including SMEs. We had 197 lots that were reviewed and awarded geographically. We had 2,000 outsourced contracts, all with differing terms. I thought we would scale down to 15 per cent of the original whole but the process has left us with just 1 per cent. We can now operate to standardised practices with standardised prices, driving value back to patients. The next logical step is for FM and asset management [AM] services to fuse as one. In future, FM will not be overlooked as the ‘Cinderella’ service. Read this full article at www.tinyurl.com/hcswan3
18 | 21 APRIL 2016 | FM WORLD
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14/04/2016 11:24