Archive
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…
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…
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…
RIP Dorcan House
This week they are clearing the site where Dorcan House stood, the last part of it having been pulled down last week. As most of you reading this will not of heard of the building you probably are thinking “So what?” Well read on. Read more…
monday musings of FM in the boardroom
We talk a lot about getting FM into the boardroom and similar ambitions to further our profession and in these aims we are no different to many other specialist disciplines; when wearing my purchasing hat my colleagues there are no different, but when I have my logistics hat on my colleagues there don’t often have that issue, for they are usually firmly embedded at the top table, so how do they do that and what can FM learn? Read more…
could FMs become sought after by other functions?
I’ve been thinking a bit about transportable skills over the last weeks or so, prompted by some mentoring activity for someone who is trying to settle into one discipline, but with a background in an allied, but different field. Such issues will not come as any of my readers from the Facilities Management sphere because many of them, like me, came into FM from other functions. Read more…
facilities managers to save the nation! holiday humour from MondayMusings
Easter Monday began dull and grey, the dawn seeming to be unable to cope with the clocks wanting daylight an hour earlier. TCB was up and about feeding the cats and making tea for himself and the Berkshire Belle and looking forward to watching the motor racing from Brands Hatch that he had recorded the previous day. He’d switched on the TV as the kettle came to the boil, but it seemed that, rather than the news, there was a special broadcast to the nation by the Prime Minister on all channels. Read more…
Investing in the future is essential
Various factors may have contributed to the decline of our manufacturing capacity, but there are significant elements of the infrastructure that existed to support it still in place and one of these has been providing me with a fair bit of travel recently. Read more…
the oddest presentation I’ve had to make
It’s a bright February morning as the sales team arrive in two cars, with the low sun shining bright off the disappearing frost. This is a big morning, for they are due to present as one of five short listed suppliers for a deal that will be worth at least £5m over the first three years of the contract on offer and, if they win, there is a lot more that they can do for this client. Read more…
providing creative space, petty politics; more from the leadership front line
The benefits of providing free space for workers to network and enjoy some refreshments was the subject of a news item on one of the TV breakfast shows last week and they had wheeled in a pundit to vouch for said benefits, the person concerned citing the restaurant as a great place for such networking to take place. This caused some hilarity for the Berkshire Belle for she, like me, recalls only too well the occasion when I was almost sacked over that very issue. Read more…
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the Monday Musings column from that consultant bloke 