Archive
Things That Go Bump In The Night – part three
In crisis or incident management there is a lot that can go wrong. One outfit that I worked for had a crisis management manual that was spilling over into a third 4 inch thick ring binder. Yes it was well researched and worked well for desktop exercises, but how are you going to work with that when you are stuck out in the car park in the wet and the wind trying to sort out which page you need?
One of the big problems with thinking about what disaster might befall you is that you go down the input specification route; you plan for all sorts of things that might happen when many of them have the same two or three results and they are that you can’t use all or part of the site, or all or part of its services.
My contention is that it doesn’t matter that much why you have the problem. That just gives you a clue as to how long you have the problem for, for example if you have a gas leak outside the site and you can’t get in (or get evacuated) you can’t use the building for a few hours, but if you have a fire it will be a few days disruption to, possibly, having to move to new premises. In both cases it is the loss of use that needs priority.
All of the functional groups within the building will have their own continuity plans and the FM team need to be aware of these and support as necessary, but it is the FM team that will take most of the early actions in managing the incident.
In these pages you’ll find stories of some of the major incidents that I’ve been involved with. In The Day The Town Stood Still it was a pretty routine day when something came up, and that then escalated to a point where the improbable coincidence of a second problem brought us close to the edge of a disaster. If the team at the second site had not been effective in dealing with the flash fire, the gridlock caused by the first problem preventing the Fire Brigade from getting through might have seen us lose a building. There is a very fine line between OK and Oh S**t! sometimes.
Does fortune play a part? Maybe it does; there are times when timing or nature will be on your side, but mostly it is thinking, training and practice that will make the difference. If you’ve thought things through, planned and prepared through getting people trained and have drilled them then most of the risks are mitigated or reduced.
But to finish off this series with a final foul up, I’ll tell you about the one that really got me into FM. At the time I headed up the Operational side of a logistics business and the property maintenance team worked for HR. We had a problem with the flashing that covered the join between the wall and roof of the warehouse above the goods inwards doors and a decent repair was budgeted for.
I arrived one morning to find a queue of lorries outside. The cause was obvious; scaffolding completely blocked access to goods in and our operations were paralysed. It cost us dearly, but was easy to put right. The cause was poor communication; no-one had bothered to consider that we needed to work through the repairs. Facilities came under my control from then on so that there would be no more such incidents. and led to me making the move to FM myself.
We’ve got a backup for our backup – more things that went bump in the night
Continuing in the run up to Halloween with tales of things that went wrong, this week we turn to a bit of a farce that we enjoyed along with our friends in Information Technology.
One site I inherited when I moved from Logistics to Facilities Management was a multi story office block that was almost wholly occupied by IT people and was one of two main centres for that trade. The building was also one of the main hubs for the company’s data network and, as such, was something of a sacrosanct site.
The FM work there had been part of the IT team, but we had inherited those people along with the site. They knew their job and they knew their building but, until we arrived, they had never had a ring fenced budget and, every year, something had been lopped off to fund IT project overspends.
As we dug deeper into the backlog of maintenance one thing that I had placed on the high priority list was the emergency backup generator system. This was a thing of legend at the site and beyond; “They have a backup generator for their backup generator” people would tell you around the company in terms of some awe. The generator room in the basement had taken on qualities that might have been employed for a shrine, and the full time engineer that they had taken on to maintain the system played the role of high priest to the hilt.
Access to the room was something of a privilege, but my regional maintenance manager and I were reluctantly granted an entrance on the basis that we were now in charge. The room was pretty spotless and the two engines, one a Gardener and the other a Rolls Royce (no less) gleamed on the plinths.
The system was explained patiently to us. In the event of a power failure there was a battery backup that would allow a few minutes of power while the Gardener engine kicked in. If, for any reason that failed to fire up the Rolls Royce would deploy itself and, in the event of a long term power outage, the engines could be run alternately to keep the data flowing.
But it had never been tested. Yes, there was a switch that allowed a simulation power cut to see if these beauties would kick in and that was tried annually, but the overall system had never been tested. So I announced that we would, and requested a date when it would be convenient for us to do so.
The entire IT hierarchy were appalled and the ranks massed to oppose this folly, but in the end we got our way. We put in a bypass power source from the main switch so that the building would not actually lose power and threw the switch on the original circuit to make the generator room think that the mains had gone off.
The battery back didn’t work. It didn’t even have power enough to start the generator let alone support the building. But we had also found when we installed the by-pass that two thirds of the building, including a pair of new computer rooms, were already by-passing the backup system because corners had been cut in funding projects.
We found the money to put things right, but the backup myth died. These things have an importance at their own time, but times move on. We put a lot into that building to prepare it for the 21st century, but it has gone now, replaced by an apartment complex. Happy memories though!
Things that go bump in the night – More fun on the Facilities Front Line
We tend to talk about the things that we’ve done well, but we learn more from the things that go wrong, so with Halloween approaching , and in the spirit of things that go bump in the night, maybe it’s a good time to look at a project that went wrong. And so here’s a skeleton from my closet.
The project was to replace the water storage facility for a substantial sprinkler system. To repair it was a difficult job and would have taken the system out of action for at least 8 weeks which was not acceptable to the client or their insurers and there was also a desire to expand the system which would have required additional capacity. On that basis we elected to go for new storage which gave us the option of repairing the original one at our leisure should it be needed in the future.
In working through the options open to us the most economical way forward was to install a pair of cylindrical tanks about 50 metres from the original installation where we had an available piece of ground that would require little preparation to accept them. An appropriate engineering contractor was engaged to design the system and provide us with a specification that we could put out to tender and it was during this exercise that we made a mistake in communication, although no-one realised until much later. We had our own mechanical and electrical team and had given them the lead in working with the design engineer. When the subject of connecting an appropriate power supply to power the pumps came up, our man said that we would do that and this was true; we would do the connection at the panel. We meant the one in the nearest building; he meant the one in the new pump house.
Specification done we went out to tender. There were not too many companies capable of a job of that size so we short listed three for the final stage and had them all in on the same day for the site inspection and a question and answer session. At some point the power supply question came up and the answer was given “Client is arranging connection” by the design engineer. No-one on my team queried that because we had no reason to.
At the time our biggest issue was getting planning permission for an installation that would be partially visible to residential neighbours, many of whom were openly hostile to the site and we were into the games that one plays in these circumstances and were happy that we got through that stage with the decision that we wanted.
A contract was placed for just over £100k. It was not a hugely disruptive project because of the site that we had chosen and work proceeded quickly. At about two thirds of the way through I took a walk around with the contractor. Both tanks were substantially complete and the pump house was up and being fitted out. Laying the power cable from the pump house to the nearest building would involve digging up the road causing my occupiers possible disruption so I asked when that was scheduled for.
“But you’re doing the connection” he said, and the misunderstanding back at the start of the design stage began to emerge. Our spec did not allow for cutting and filling a trench to bridge the 50m gap and it cost us £10k to do it. All because of an ambiguity in the spec: Always read the small print, especially if you wrote it yourself.
Mum, Dad, I want to be a facilities manager when I leave school
Just what did a boss do? I wasn’t too sure, but had decided that I was going to be a boss when I left school. It wasn’t my first choice, that had proved impractical, and my second choice was vetoed by my parents, but my Mum wanted me to be a City Gent, heading off in pin striped suit with a briefcase and rolled brolly every morning; that seemed to sound like a boss and so that was what I would be.
But, again, what did they do? The people my parents worked for were captains of industry; one a director at Beecham’s (long before Smith & Kline turned up), another had his name, and that of his partner, on many domestic appliances in kitchens around the country and another was the Admiral in charge of the Royal Naval College for example.
Any of those suited me, but to become one surely you had to know what they did? TV and films were not a lot of help, but then along came The ‘Plane Makers and its sequel The Power Game. There Sir John Wilder made fortunes, lost them and remade them, he had the big office, the big car, was married to a smart and pretty wife (and had a smart and pretty mistress) and got involved in all sorts of Machiavellian dealings with rivals and colleagues alike. Sounded good to me; where did I sign up?
The reality of course was somewhat different as I was to find when I got there. I suppose that the first time that I got close to the fictional Sir John’s life (by the way where is my knighthood?) was the time that I was de facto MD of a business unit turning over around £130M pa. I had the office, the car, the smart attractive wife and the Machiavellian stuff and loved pretty much every minute of it, but then, as with Sir John, mergers and takeovers saw me on the move.
And that is how I got, in the real sense, into Facilities Management. I didn’t set out to be in FM, and have joked that I’d been thrown out of everywhere else. Not quite true, but I had worked in finance, operations, sales, purchasing and IT and hold professional qualifications in both of the latter disciplines, so I wasn’t there just marking time. As a buyer I passed exams in accounting, economics and commercial law amongst others
One of the things that I brought to FM was that wide business background because by then I had realised that what I wanted to be was not a boss so much as a general manager; a businessman if you like. That childhood image of the boss was really where I ended up.
In facilities management a lot has been done to raise the profile of the job, and it is great to see so many young professionals amongst our ranks. BIFM have done a great job in moving things forward and maybe we are close to the point where FM can be a clear career choice for school leavers.
I, like many, came into FM as something of a generalist. If the next generation of FMs can be specialists that is great, but we must not lose sight of the need for FMs to have a wide business education, because it is the world of commerce that FM serves. We need to be able to speak their language and to be comfortable in their world, because that is how we can ensure that they trust and respect what we can contribute.
First impressions count, but you can’t judge a book by its cover
Two very conflicting statements, but both are encountered pretty much daily in business, so which is true?
We talk a lot about the first 10 seconds, the 30 second elevator pitch, the 6 word pitch and we micro blog in under 140 characters. We talk in sound bites and all know people who have the attention span of a gnat. Novelists have to grab their readers with a killer opening sentence or the book will go back on the shelf. A lot of things have that immediacy these days, so there is a lot to being able to grab attention.
Being able to do this is a good discipline anyway; to be able to scope a project or business plan on one side of A4 means that you have thought it out and, probably, have it right. To be able to put a point across in three or four sentences in a meeting is effective and saves everyone time. If you can cut to the chase and avoid all of the peripheral, often irrelevant, issues it is a great business skill and well worth practising.
I am a great fan of the three minute presentation as a discipline. To be able to report on your work area’s KPIs, to update on project progress, run through your plans for the next month or whatever in 180 seconds makes you focus on the important points. It also steers you away from bogging down with the worst excesses of visual aids and presentation tools. A three minute presentation is also easier to learn by heart, or maybe with just a few crib notes, and so it provides a great way of improving your skills at talking on your feet.
Making the right first impression may well get you hired for that job or win your company that piece of business, and there are a lot of sources of help geared to pointing you in the right direction. From the view point of the person selling, whether it is themselves a product or a service, I always recommend trying to master the approach.
But when you are the person hiring or buying, why are you allowing yourself to be so shallow? Why are you risking your business (and your reputation) on what can only be a kneejerk reaction? Let’s face it, would you really want to hire someone who made important business decisions without thinking things through? Sure experience helps you reach decisions quickly, and there are times when you need to make a snap decision, but are we really willing to accept that decisions are routinely made on gut reactions?
Yes, you can judge a book by its cover, but to do so is to run the risk of missing out on a gem, hence the adage being that you can’t. Perhaps it should really be that you shouldn’t, but my point is that, when you are making a choice, you should make as thorough as possible evaluation of your choices to give yourself the best chance of reaching the right decision.
My buying background influences that thinking, but so does my general management experience, the number of industrial accidents I have investigated, the number of disciplinary cases I have examined, the strategic and tactical plans I have evaluated let alone the hundreds of prospective employees or promotees I have interviewed and assessed.
Of course we have to sift, but the later stages of evaluating anything or anyone should be thorough. Making snap decisions at that stage makes very little sense, and I suggest that those that do are taking an unnecessary risk.
Is the customer king? Or is it the client? Why is the difference important?
Recently I’ve been doing some work with clients on the joys of customer service, in one case the delivery of product direct to those that have ordered it and in the other the delivery of service to various sites where the contract, and therefore the service level, has been placed with a central client.
In the former case things are straightforward; the product is requested and the customer advised as to when it will come. As long as the promise is kept the customer is happy and will come again, or at least in theory, because there are times when the customer doesn’t take account of the fact that what has been ordered has to be put somewhere when it arrives, and they don’t always realise quite how large a delivery might be. Back in my logistics days I had software developed to flag exceptional order quantities; “Do you really want 1000 boxes or did you mean 10 boxes of 100?” Far better to check than to send a lorry load out knowing it might all come back. It is all good customer service.
Where you are dealing with a centrally placed contract though things can get more difficult. Let’s call the contract placer the client and the recipient of the service the customer here. Now the client will specify a service level and this will probably be fairly well stripped down on price grounds, but what do they tell the customers to expect? It should be the client/customer organisation that ensures that they are able to play their part in the contract and sometimes the communication is good, other times it is nonexistent, but in most cases there is no effort whatsoever to make a connection between the two parts of the business and it is left to the contractor to be the interface.
One of the great benefits that I have enjoyed in my managerial career is to have worked in sales, operations and purchasing and so have seen how these three disciplines interlink (or not) and maybe I have a greater sense of perspective as a result, but I still recall a career low point when I took over an FM contract that had been centrally placed with no thought to what was going on at the sharp end.
Off I went to the first Quality of Service quarterly meeting of my tenure. We sat either side of the table with the client as they ran through the KPIs. Most were within the required standard, but a couple were not and we got the required dressing down. That dealt with what was actually contractual and relevant to what we were paid, but then we got on to “end user feedback” (complaints). Now there we got pretty well hammered by the people we were serving on a day to day basis in every area except for the ones where we were failing the KPIs, but it didn’t matter to the client because it wasn’t in the contract. They still went through the motions of giving us a hard time, but it was pretty half hearted.
We turned that contract round in spite of the intransigent client team by talking to the people at the top of the organisation about what they really needed from us, not to deliver just for them, but to enable them to deliver what their customers wanted. You have to think down the line.
Contracts should be about what a business needs to succeed, and should be flexible enough to adapt to changing needs. You should never paint yourself into a corner, should you?
On the anniversary of 9/11, an awful piece of emergency management
This morning I went out to do my usual Sunday morning shop for the week at one of the major chains local emporium. They have adopted the civilised approach of opening the door at 0930 even though the ludicrous Sunday trading laws mean that they can’t serve you before 1000, so I can, at least, wander round filling my cart and be back home at a reasonable hour to get on with my day.
I was accompanied as usual by a companion who, like me, is a veteran of managing large establishments and running countless emergency evacuations of such places, and so when a bell sounded a couple of times and an alarm started up we resignedly began the journey from half way round the store towards the exit: We know the signs, especially when my companion was literally shoulder charged by one of the store employees running towards the store room and bakery area.
Sure enough the public address burst into life and a message asking everyone to leave the store began, but then an extraordinary thing happened. From the Staff Only area that the lady who had bounced off my companion had vanished into, employees began to emerge shouting “There’s a fire, get out!” and running, yes running, towards the exit.
My companion and I were making a calm departure having abandoned our shopping carts at the side of an aisle out of the way and the other shoppers were also leaving in an orderly fashion, but not the employees, they were weaving and bobbing as they rushed to get out and the “There’s a fire, get out” was heard several times from more than one of them as they rushed past us.
It was truly one of the most extraordinary scenes I have witnessed at an emergency evacuation. I have been in some tight corners over the years, some of which you’ve read about here, but this morning I felt genuine fear. Thank goodness there was not a panic amongst the shoppers, especially as we got near the narrows of the exit. My companion was not too steady having had a fall at home the night before and, large as I am, I’m not too sure that I could have shielded them adequately in a stampede.
Fortunately we, and everyone else, got out OK, but I am writing to the company concerned with some observations. Given our experience of these things we did not hang around for the aftermath, but decanted to a rival store up the road where I may start to shop in future on the basis that I might be safer.
The other observation I will make is that, having assembled the store team in the centre of the car park two of the supervisory team, presumably having completed the roll call, appeared to realise that the main entrance had been left open and, seemingly, unguarded for about three minutes. They then both began to run back to the entrance. Why run through a car park with some, like me beginning to drive out and others still driving in unaware of the drama? Why run anywhere at all?
Whether there was a fire or not is not important, what matters is that an emergency evacuation should be carried out in a calm and controlled manner and this one was not, it was almost a “How Not To” demonstration.
All in all it was a shameful performance. I would love to do a debrief using the CCTV footage (assuming they have it) and to try and help improve. I’m still having problems believing it happened.
Why am I so keen on planning and preparing for crisis management? I was born to it
I’ve written here a few times about various aspects of incident management and, as one or two have remarked, maybe I’m a bit of an anorak about these things. They may have a point because, to some extent, incident management has been with me since I was in short trousers.
My childhood was spent living on country estates, more that usually with a farm attached. We didn’t own these places, my parents worked there so that explains my interest in customer service; I was, in fact, born into service. But the incident management side of things comes from that background too. In recent years risk assessments have become a fad in many ways, but they are just a formalisation of what I was taught to do in the late 1950s by people who understood such things intuitively.
So how does what I learned all those years ago down on the farm fit with the management of modern property? Well take one sort of incident management that a typical facilities management team should have down pat, that of fire. One of the things that we handled with considerable frequency was fire. Not just the risk of fire (and I have seen a barn fire at close quarters), but managing fires that we would start on purpose. We would have at least one managed conflagration a week as we burned refuse, burned off fields, bracken or whatever. And when I talk about burning refuse I mean bonfires that the average village would be proud of on November 5th; you can create a huge weekly pile from a 50+ acre estate.
These things are not done willy nilly, they are carefully arranged, taking into account the wind, time of day and nature of what you are burning. A compost heap large enough to keep Time Team busy excavating it for a week will burn for days if it spontaneously combusts. Siting the bonfire, compost heap or whatever is carefully thought through. Precautions are taken and what you’ll do if things don’t go as planned are worked out. We were taught to understand consequences and about accepting responsibility.
On a farm or large country estate there is a lot of serious kit and danger lurks all around. As kids we were brought up to understand and respect things, so maybe it should be no surprise that it is so ingrained in me. That’s not to say that I don’t take risks; I do, but I think about it first. From what I learned as a child I got to think about things like always checking my escape route(s) when I stay somewhere away from home, like counting the seat rows between me and the nearest two exits when I fly, like my winter survival kit that I carry in the car from November through March.
I had the benefit of learning about these things to the degree that it became automatic. It was only later in life when I became responsible for large numbers of people that I began to think about it and to analyse what I was doing and why as part of developing drills and desktop run throughs. When you have a bloody great fire every week on purpose you are doing it for real, but when you are running big buildings, thankfully, you don’t, so you need to have dummy drills.
Practice does make perfect which is why I have ridden my teams hard on these things, and that is why we coped so well with some of the incidents that have described in these columns. It’s in my blood.
when it comes to leadership, one size does not fit all
I’m talking about effective leadership here rather than use other adjectives like good or great. This week I am writing about leadership that works in that it gets people following. To digress for a moment, the term following is something of an ambiguous concept here because, in most cases, the followers are usually in the van doing the things that the leader steers them to do, but the leader getting behind the followers, watching their backs, is as much a part of leadership as anything else.
It may be a slightly abstract concept, but the leader is not necessarily in front with their followers behind when it comes to the execution of the leader’s plan, and that does need to be understood. You can still lead from the front, sometimes you have to, and other times it’s just good to do so, but most of the time you will in the rear. Good leaders learn this, great ones do it intuitively.
Back at effective leadership though, the point that I wanted to make this week is around styles of leadership. Everyone is an individual and has their own motivational triggers; some will respond best to flattery, some to bribery, some, odd as it may seem on the surface, to bullying (please don’t interpret that as me being in favour of such things). Understanding individual needs is very important in a small team where you need every member to have total trust in each other as well as in the leader. In a larger team it is good for the leader to know all of their team, but such things take time and effort that might be better deployed on other things in the short term.
The crucial need is to instil in the team a feeling that individual failures are acceptable because the trust and support within the team will compensate. There is a point at which the desire to not let your colleagues down kicks in and drives performance up, but that comes from knowing that you can fail whilst believing that you won’t because people have shown confidence in you.
One of the easiest leadership tasks is taking over a team with low morale or who are faced with adverse circumstances. Here a siege mentality can be created without too much effort and an “us against the rest” spirit flows through your team. One of the problems with this approach is getting out of it once you’ve got the team firing on all cylinders because it has dangers in the long run. Using a little paranoia to kick start things is all very well, but you do need to ensure that it is quickly replaced by the confidence that will come as positive results flow in.
Overcoming fear of failure is one of the hardest things to do, but it can be done. Fear of failure will paralyse even the best team. If you allow people to fail and deal with those failures in a positive way they start to lose the fear of failing, but it goes beyond the individual; you need to have that collective feeling within the team that people will cover for each other. As long as everyone can see and believe that all are doing their best, that mistakes are dealt with positively (and that includes dealing with some things in a disciplinary sense when the need arises), then fear of failure starts to fade from the culture.
There is no one leadership model; as a leader you have to be able to understand what will work best in any set of circumstances.
I support this charity
British Blogs
the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 