Archive
teaching is a two way street
This week I will be wearing my logistics hat again as I am running a warehousing and materials management course and will re-visiting the delights of standard deviations, calculating point loads and similar mathematics along with the more practical side of what mechanical aids to use for various applications. Read more…
You don’t agree? Make my day and tell me
I was probably about 10 when I last did a cartwheel and, as a painfully thin child, I wasn’t too bad at them. To try one now at my current age, heigh and weight would not be a good idea for myself or my surroundings, but last week I was almost tempted to try. The reason for this juvenile excitement was news that someone had disagreed with some of my thinking as expressed in the FM World Diary column. I was delighted, because it is discussion and debate that moves things forward and helps ourselves, our profession and industry move forward. Read more…
Trick or treat? Some skeletons from the closet…
Keeping up my Halloween tradition of talking about things that went bump in the night, here are a few more oops moments that I learned from. Maybe they will help you avoid similar mistakes. Read more…
customer service is an attitude of mind
I usually end up writing about customer service when I am over in the USA and this time I had barely arrived before a striking comparison between how things work in the US and the UK arose. Read more…
acting unethically does not make good business sense
One of the topics I try to deal with in this column is ethical behaviour. Apart from my need to maintain such standards in order to comply with the code of ethics for each of the three professional bodies of which I hold membership it reflects a basic principle that I was brought up to observe. Read more…
returning to Auld Reekie
This week I will be flying up to Edinburgh to enjoy the BIFM Scotland conference and I’m looking forward to catching up with some old friends as well as making some new ones. There is some synchronicity in this trip in that when I arrive at the airport there on Wednesday evening it will be twenty seven years to the day, almost to the minute, since I first arrived there. On that occasion I arrived by road, being driven down from Aberdeen where were had run a training workshop that day. Edinburgh was the second stop on that tour with Glasgow on the third day before flying back South. Read more…
we need long term thinking, not short term populism
At a seminar last week one of my fellow speakers explained to the audience the true state of our energy production which brought into sharp focus the empty promises that one of our political leaders, and I use that term loosely here, had made a couple of day earlier. Now this is not an attack on any one party, but it is one on the premise that people can really be led by populist talk. Read more…
musings on poor procurement and management on the soccer front
Although I am not a close follower of football these days, the nonsense of making a stadium all seater in the interests of safety and then allowing everyone to stand up is enough to put me off, and then there are those ridiculous shorts! But I do keep a passing interest, and a couple of things caught my attention last week. Read more…
musings on the role of FM
It is almost 45 years since I left school and went to work, ironically in some ways, in what we might now call FM as I was taken on as a trainee building surveyor for my first proper job in the back end of the sixties. Whilst most of what we dealt with was domestic property it did give me an introduction to a range of commercial properties from, shops through industrial buildings and on to farms and through that a graphic understanding of the need to maintain the asset and the issues of prioritising expenditure, especially when money is scarce. Understanding that linkage between the premises and the business should be at the heart of the debate over the future of the FM profession because there is always a driver there. At the simplest level this can be the the way an arable farmer will have different priorities to a livestock farmer, or the way that a shopkeeper will spend more on front of house than in their stockroom, but you can scale this principle up and apply it to Facilities Management as we now know it. Read more…
Caveat Emptor – still as true as when the Roman’s coined the phrase
Buyer Beware, or Caveat Emptor as the Romans used to put it, is still very much a truism despite all of the legislation that successive Governments, and the EU, have tried to impose to protect consumers. For business folk, who enjoy less protection with their working hats on than they do as individuals, more care has to be taken over what you are buying and who you are buying from.
Due diligence is a term often applied to this process, and when done well it is applied not just to the initial, pre-contract stage, but also over the duration of the contractual relationship. A while back we had the adulterated meat problem whereby what was being delivered was not what was expected. As this was an end product being supplied to consumers the problem was picked up through random testing as part of the consumer protection process, but apparently not by the purchasing organisation(s) concerned. I saw the other day a large sign in one store saying that all of their meat was 100% British or Irish. That may have been intended to reassure, but it could it doesn’t preclude it being 100% horse, rat, dog or any other sort of meat; caveat emptor again perhaps. Read more…
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