Facilities Management and The Business of Space

Citation

Hinks, J. (2000), "Facilities Management and The Business of Space", Facilities, Vol. 18 No. 1/2, pp. 90-91. https://doi.org/10.1108/f.2000.18.1_2.90.1

Space management is rarely off the agenda in modern facilities management. For many businesses workspace management has become the visible face of modern facilities management, a support function directly associated with conferring (or denying) operational agility on businesses operating within changing markets. Supported by the phenomenal rise in the capability of modern specialised IT, space management has become a highly technical function which is increasingly able to support rapid business change. However, as the authors note in their preface, this rise in space management potential needs to be accompanied by a change in view of the role of space in business. Operational space management capability needs now to be supported by a corresponding strategic and holistic perspective, rather than being used to compensate for a lack of business foresight. This sets the theme for this book, which is “to create the opportunity to add real value to the organisation by moving from responsive to anticipatory workspace planning”. Through this approach, the authors offer their vision for moving space management into an integrated and strategic mode.

The book opens with a review of space planning, from a business perspective. Using the development of space planning as a vehicle, the authors demonstrate how workspace is inter‐twined with the evolution of business process and ways of working. They note how the increasingly rapid changes in those business processes and ways of working brought on by today’s pace of information revolution create a new imperative for workspace planning. This section is well‐referenced and provides a good introduction in its own right.

As would be expected, the book deals with addressing this imperative through the space planning process and the balancing of demand and supply for space. This is covered comprehensively by a combination of academically‐grounded discussion, written in a highly accessible and pragmatic manner, supplemented with occasional case notes. Two chapters deal with matching demand and supply for workspace. The first chapter looks at reconciling demand and supply whilst retaining flexibility; the second considers the management of space over time.

I found this second chapter to be the pivotal part of the book, the point where the distinctiveness and the value of the text started to emerge most overtly. The authors challenge the reader to consider space proactively, offering as a start point the task of taking space management beyond adaptation for survival (coping) and towards thinking proactively about workspace‐over‐time (changing). In doing so they introduce the inter‐relationship between operation workspace and issues such as workspace disposal, thinking strategically about the management of churn, and procurement strategies for property. Several of these issues could have been covered in more depth, and have been elsewhere, but not without disturbing the holistic perspective of this book. Instead the authors move on to look at the future of workspace planning from a business driver’s perspective, in an approach which resonates with the introductory section on the origins of workspace characteristics. However, the reader is now encouraged to see space as the potential driver and enabler of change rather than the effect, and space management as anticipatory rather than merely responsive.

Much of the value of this book is the way the authors stimulate off‐the‐page thinking by systematically introducing the facilities manager to possibilities and strategic insights on workspace management. Overall, I think the authors achieved their stated aim of helping the facilities manager “step back from the canvas” – the combination of the pragmatic and rounded coverage of workspace issues from an operational and strategic viewpoint offers a stimulus to a wide readership including (and perhaps especially) those already “expert” in space management. Of course, and as it is generally with books on strategy, the challenge of applying holistic concepts is entirely context‐dependent. So whilst the case notes illustrate individual themes, the rounded impact of all of these issues remains something which the reader will have to undertake individually for themselves, off‐the‐page. Herein lies the future opportunities for businesses and their space managers operating in rapidly‐changing markets – there is no single solution.