PART 2- Preparing for the journey – Planning the roadmap

If your new to this blog, you may want to start off reading PART 1 in this series.

Do you remember the 1966 science fiction movie ‘Fantastic Voyage’ where a team of scientists board the submarine Proteus which is then miniaturized to 1 micron in length and inserted into the body of scientist suffering from a blood clot in order to save his life and acquire his knowledge of an important discovery? The crew encountered numerous roadblocks and challenges along their journey through the various systems in the scientists’ body. If you want to refresh your memory, check it out on YouTube staring Raquel Welch and Donald Pleasence.

Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be taking a voyage of our own traveling through the living holistic ecosystem of the real property – supply chain, seeing how internal systems are connected and dependent upon each other, directly impacting operational costs, time to market and competitiveness of the each stakeholders organization core business, as well as the real estate investment community.

And like the movie, instead of using x-rays, cat-scans and surgery, we’ll use a storyboard map describing several systems (See Table 1) and sub-systems that rely on each other for survival and overall health and well being of our industry for a particular business scenario. We’ll drill into these areas looking how business processes have been done to date and new opportunities for major improvements.

One key point important to comprehend is the supply chain is comprised of two major stakeholder groups (See Table 2), those who need a roof over their heads to do their core business as noted by the group on the left, and those who provide goods and services for those in either column.

Here’s where the industry begins to blur as the pendulum has been moving towards increased outsourcing of non-core services, contracting service providers now occupy the seats within all of end user groups in the left column, making it indistinguishable between employees and contractors. Furthermore, because large portions of the workforce can work from anywhere, anytime, Full Time Employees (FTE’s) and contractors can be located anywhere on the globe, handing projects off to workers in other time zones for round the clock production. Like it or not, the distributed workforce is here to stay and it’s having an ever-increasing impact on the commercial real estate industry.

The storyboard we’ll work on should be quite familiar to you. It’s about an organization whose business plan created by senior management includes the creation of a new division to produce a new product or service. Our storyboard will walk through many of the business processes required to take the project from vision to occupancy, looking at the various stakeholders, tools, techniques and methodologies. We’ll also be keeping a watchful eye out for roadblocks affecting costs, time and quality might be found and discuss how we might overcome them.

Next week we’ll begin working through the storyboard.

Please note, the tables and diagrams in my blog are meant to be high level generalizations, so please save yourself time writing me about detailed items I may have missed, though I would like to hear your ideas and comments regarding the direction and content of this blog.