Real Solutions

If you’re new to this blog, you may want to start off reading PART 1 in this multi-part series.

In ‘Part 2 – Planning the Roadmap’ my intent was to get you thinking about viewing the real property industry as a holistic ecosystem made up of an interconnecting supply-chain where the industry as a whole is dependent on how well the individual parts work individually and together to support, in our case - just about every type of business imaginable that is somehow fixed to the earth.

In this installment, we’ll set the stage by using a fictional storyboard where business executives decide to launch a new product line in their biopharmaceutical company. Let’s assume this is a large multinational organization with a significant property portfolio of owned and leased properties. We’ll use the storyboard in Figure-1 as our roadmap to identify the major steps this organization needs to undertake in order to provide the working environment to produce and market their goods and services. Over the next several installments, we’ll drill down into each major area, considering each stakeholders information requirements such as:
• What information is required to complete a specific business process?
• Where do they get the information?
• What do they do with it?
• Who uses it?
• Who else in the supply chain could re-use or re-purpose this information?

Along the way, I’ll provide examples of organizations who are leading the way, creating innovative solutions, improving individual business processes, for their organizations and the industry.

Now that the groundwork is done, let’s look at the first step.

The first step would be for the organization to identify requirements for product development and support.

• Will they require additional staff for R&D, Sales & Marketing, Support, Manufacturing, Finance, IT, EH&S, Security?
• Could they consolidate their existing portfolio to provide the necessary floor area requirements or will they need additional space?

Upon completion of staffing requirements during the Planning stage as noted STEP 1 on the Roadmap, either the organizations space planners, portfolio managers or architects can begin programming headcount requirements against the available space inventory. While some organizations simply use a multiplier like ‘Square Footage by Occupant’ as noted in the International Facility Management Associations (IFMA) ‘Space and Project Management Benchmarks, Research Report #28’, a substantially more accurate method of programming would be to combine Personnel Entitlement classifications with Space Classification standards (See Table 3), creating a shopping list of space requirements and a sub-total of floor area requirements. Space planners would then add in the necessary support spaces for Conference, Break, Cafeterias, Mail, Reprographics, Restrooms, etc. This shopping list of space requirements is used to establish the floor area requirements against which space planners could determine if sufficient area is available in the existing portfolio or if the organization will require additional new space.

Several member organizations of the Open Standards Consortium for Real Estate (OSCRE) have identified several key performance metrics that are in dire need of standardization and have invested labor resources and funding to finally put a stake in the ground in order to eliminate the thousands of best practices, of which no-two are the same, yielding apples-to-Volkswagen analysis instead of apples-to-apples.

Contributing organizations Public Works Government Services Canada (PWGSC), U.S. General Services Administration, FAMIS Software, Manhattan Software and TRIRIGA Software collaborated in an OSCRE virtual work group environment to develop the OSCRE Standards for Space Classifications. You can obtain a copy of this industry standard at the OSCRE website by following the Work Group pull down menu.

Space Classifications are one of the most important types of code lists employed by most every sector and stakeholder type, used to identify a closet from an environmentally controlled area suitable to locate servers; to establish metrics for enclosed to open seating, office to conference rooms and absolutely essential for space forecasting and moves, adds and changes for personnel seating assignments.

Like Intuit’s QuickBooks built in chart of accounts, software vendors have begun incorporating OSCRE’s Space Classification standard into their products, enabling consumers to shave off as much as six months of development time they typically spend convening internal staff and consultants to build their own, which again, don’t match anyone else’s.

Next issue we’ll look at the steps this organization takes next when they find they don’t have enough contiguous space and have to find and acquire additional space.