Archive
Do your Key Performance Indicators work, or are you locked into the past?
Input specifications used to be the norm; we would be very specific about what we wanted and how it should be made and delivered, or performed in the case of a service. I can well remember deciding to go out and start replacing the fork lift truck (FLT) fleet at a logistics operation that I had just taken over. Having talked to the vehicle buyer they produced a spec that had been used previously; it was half an inch thick, had drawings of all sorts of components that are standard on any FLT and even had a requirement for a specific pantone colour plus three pages alone on the fleet number, font, style and positioning. Read more…
Can we ever expect those that we elect to act ethically?
It’s a few years ago now that I made an important decision about the way that I would live my life: I decided that I would try hard not to get angry. It is a wasteful emotion and it drains you, and so, taking the view that you have a choice as to whether or not to get angry, I decided that I would choose not to.
Largely this policy has worked for me, but my resolve does get tested from time to time and this last week has seen one of those trials of my resolve. I had started the week off by emailing in my next column for FM World where I have written about business ethics. I won’t pre-empt that here, but by the end of the week we had seen the seemingly scandalous issue of the Welfare to Work case erupt all over our news media. This has echoes of the National Bullying Helpline case that rattled around the UK from its base here in Swindon a year or so back where, again, a conflict of interest was apparently overlooked.
There are two aspects of these sort of cases that threaten to raise my bile levels; the first is that both of these issues are built on milking the hopes of the vulnerable and I find that utterly despicable; those who perpetrate such scandals are beneath even contempt, but it is a fact of life that these low life individuals get to live the high life at the expense of the rest of us.
The second issue is how on earth are they allowed to get the opportunity and then to exploit it? Surely someone should have seen these things and closed them down, but they patently didn’t and allowed it to carry on until the media blew the lid off for them. (Which is why, although I am appalled at how standards in the media have slipped I am still firmly in favour of the right to freedom of speech).
I am a businessman with a lot of experience in supply chains, so I look at these contracts with that experience shaping the way I see things. I work with the Public Procurement Regulations, from both sides, on a regular basis and, in my view, they are nothing but a Supplier’s Charter. In both of the cases that I have referred to above the regulations should have been applied to the letting of those contracts. The regulations are supposed to help deliver value for the public purse, but consistently fail to do so, and although they may not have been the only poor element of these two contracts, they will have played a part in the nonsense that has emerged.
But how on earth were these contracts allowed to go so far before being exposed? That has to be a leadership issue, because a good leader, even just a competent leader, would have seen things going wrong. I can’t believe that no-one saw the problems, so there has to be a chain of command issue whereby the bad news was being suppressed and, in that case, it is doubtful that we, Hoi Polloi, will ever get to know the truth, for just as there was a conflict of interest at the heart of the contracts, there will be a conflict of interest in allowing the truth to come out: Someone will have to take responsibility.
My anger is just about under control here, but can you see any of those happily pointing fingers at business bonuses taking responsibility for the Welfare to Work scandal? I can’t.
Sustainability; an alternative view
Over the last few years we have seen sustainability appear as a major topic and it has become a word that people like to chuck into conversations and business proposals and to have included in policies. As with most words that get overused it tends to lose its meaning and therefore its power; ironic that, at least in this context, because if you think about what the word really means, I’m saying that it has become unsustainable. Most people today will probably associate sustainability with the environment (another word that has seen its meaning shift through wide usage), but I still like to use it to describe the practice of keeping something going.
I got onto today’s train of thought talking about charity, or more specifically charities and, as these things do, one thought led to another. The first one was around what happens to the benefit; we’re all familiar with the expression “give a man a fish” etc, but how many of these charitable efforts have actually been successful? Or are they just sustaining the problem? Like most businesses, charities have two parts; one that is selling and one that isn’t. In the case of the charity, the selling part, as far as I am describing it here, is the bit bringing in the money: It’s the people that sell the charity to donors. The other part is the one that distributes the benefit.
In the context of the discussion that I was having the issue was just how often charities suffer the same blight as other organisations in that they can grow a large and often unnecessary function in between these two parts. Sight gets lost of what the real objective of the organisation is and the bit in the middle takes on an importance and a life of its own at the expense of its parent. Just as I talked last week about a process becoming a trap if it wasn’t right, many organisations end up with more focus on the process than on doing the job.
In the world of music sustain is about how long you can keep a note going; we talk about sustain with regard, perhaps, to an organ or a guitar and we refer to the time before the note decays. And that use of the word decay is very apt in terms of today’s Musing, for what happens to organisations so often is that a form of decay sets in and spoils the connection between the two halves. The ability of the one to sustain the other begins to rot away.
So my point is that we should be looking to improve the sustainability of our own organisations, be they public, private or third sectors, by removing any areas that will be susceptible to decay or rot and to apply lean principles to sharpen the connection between the two parts. Whether you are selling products, providing services or delivering benefits, whatever your organisation’s reason for existence, the other part of the organisation should be focussed solely on supporting that activity.
Try an internet search for Trireme. You’ll find it is one of those old ships with banks of oars. Forget for a moment what it meant to be chained to one of those oars, but consider how all of those folks could get a ship that size moving at up to 8 knots. That is the power of all rowing in harmony. But if you don’t all pull together you will go nowhere. What we need to see more of is everyone making a sustained effort focused on delivering objectives and results.
Brushing off the Small Print
Over the weekend I was informed by a major UK retailer that toothpaste is not a dental product. You may find that as bizarre as I did, but it is true, as far as they are concerned within the limits of the relevant promotion.
Whatever their logic in drawing that line for their promotion may be my view is that it is another symptom of a malaise that we really should have stamped out by now; that of the Small Print. We had started to make real progress a few years ago with having clarity about things, even in those last bastions of the Small Print, the insurance and travel businesses, but it has begun to make a comeback.
Probably one of the drivers has been the budget airlines where, in some ways rightly, they have segmented their product to offer the customer a wider choice. We haven’t quite reached the “Inside or outside seating sir?” level, but, like many, I began to use budget airlines for business travel and was more than happy to just take a briefcase and be able to waft up to Glasgow and back for about a fifth of what it would cost me for a return fare on the train to London. The trains have followed suit with advance bookings and such since and it all helps to keep costs down if you can make the timings work and accept the risk of not making it to the airport or station in time for your booked return. Personally I don’t find that the web sites that you book through are particularly misleading or hard to use; fortunately I still have enough functioning brain cells to understand that being late is too late whether it is one minute or thirty. Either way I’m late and it will cost me regardless of why I’m late.
I’ve read recently that the Government want to introduce legislation to stop such companies not telling you that there is another 3.5% or similar to pay by credit card until you get to the late stages of the transaction. That’s fair enough I suppose, but in general I’m not hugely in favour of legislation at this sort of level. In fact I’m not in favour of Government interfering in business at all if we can help it, but the problem with some of this is that the people marketing these products view their customers as gullible enough to be drawn in far enough towards the purchasing decision before they clobber them with the real deal. However, this is the dodgy second hand car salesman technique that people of my vintage will be familiar with and sooner or later there will be a backlash.
So much for the B2C world, but we’re not like that in B2B are we? Unfortunately we often are, most often because we haven’t taken the basic steps of being sure about what we are buying and understanding the deal. Like me at the weekend we have rushed into the transaction thinking that we were on to a good deal but not having made sure that it was as good as we thought.
For me the choice was easy enough; pay up or walk away, but what if the deal had been for equipment costing a six figure sum or a three year service contract? That is not the sort of deal that you want to make a mistake on. Take your time to understand what you want and why and always make sure that, Small Print and all, the deal you make will deliver what you need.
Useful Tools – Pareto and the 80:20 Principle
“We couldn’t get our heads out of the trench for long enough to see which way the bullets were coming from”. The speaker was one of the many people I worked with; in my younger days, almost all of my male colleagues had been in the armed services. I thought that the expression was wonderful and much better than not seeing the wood for the trees. Over the years that I have been at work it has been very apt because, so often, people are fire fighting the small stuff so much that they can’t work on the things that would deal with the cause of all that small stuff.
My colleague’s problem would have been solved by what we call in management speak the helicopter view, but it is one of the reasons why the military always like to capture the high ground; they can see what is going on and that makes it so much easier to manage.
In business we have that dreadful expression “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”. I say dreadful, because I’ve heard it parroted so many times by people who want to spend so much time measuring and pondering over the results that they rarely ever get round to managing anything, but the expression is true. The trick in making it work is in what we mean by measuring.
If you are under constant fire you don’t have enough time to do the job properly let alone start producing all sorts of statistics, but measurement doesn’t always have to be so formal. Try this as an example: Walk into one of the working areas at your firm and just stand to one side for two or three minutes. What do you see and hear? Is it quiet and calm, or are people looking harassed with ‘phones ringing and high levels of noise? Is it tidy or is there stuff piled all over the place?
What you have just done is measure with your eyes and ears and you will have formed a pretty accurate assessment of that team. This may well be one that you would not have got from their numbers, because the performance statistics may well show that the chaotic team are hitting their targets, but observation is every bit as powerful a measurement tool as the graphs that come off the computer: There is nothing wrong with measuring by rule of thumb.
If you are a young manager wanting to make things work better then start by using those eyes and ears that you got as standard equipment when you came into the world. Even when you are under terrific pressure there will be information that you can use to help you. You will know where your biggest problem area is, so think a bit about why. Pareto’s 80:20 principle suggests that 80% of your problems come from 20% of what you do, so try putting that to work. Say you are getting 10 calls a day from Finance about invoice queries. If you can put that one thing right that could mean those 10 calls stop, and then you suddenly have that time free to look at another problem. You won’t solve every one, but if you can start to give yourself time to stick your head up and have a look around you are on the way to gaining control.
And if your boss is into formal measurement, just tell them that you are working to the Pareto principle, the 80:20 rule. Pareto is a probability distribution, but also works as a rule of thumb.
It’s 2062. Or is it?
For the third and final part of our holiday humour trilogy we move from the past to the future. Content after his New Year dinner and with a couple of glasses of claret on board, ThatConsultantBloke (TCB) is half asleep on the sofa doing his emails when he inadvertently clicks on a link and his video messaging software kicks into life. A silhouetted figure appears on his VDU;
TCB: Er, hello?
Other Person (OP) You are through to the Global Institute of Business Infrastructure Management, how may we help?
TCB: I’m not sure. I clicked on a link in my email about speaking at your conference.
OP: Yes, I see now. You were very active in the old Facilities Management arena and we were looking for someone to give our members some idea of just how much progress we have made, but also to see if there were lessons that we could learn from history.
TCB: I’m not sure I follow you. I am still very active in FM.
OP: Perhaps you are, but you are in 2012 and we are in 2062. That is why you may have problems seeing me as you will be on an old version of Windows.
TCB: So you are 50 years ahead! My goodness! So how do you guys work with the likes of BIFM and IFMA?
OP: These were absorbed long since and the GIBIM was formed from them.
TCB: So you don’t call what we do FM any more then?
OP: No. No-one really understood what FM was about and, in any case, Facilities was not a good expression. Did you not have a saying “Can I use your Facilities” as a euphemism for the toilet? What credibility could we expect naming a profession after a lavatory?
TCB: (laughing) Well, the architects always used to say “Here come the janitors” whenever we arrived at a meeting!
OP: Architects! They have learned their place in the scheme of things now. They do what they are told and we have few problems with them these days.
TCB: So how do things work in FM, sorry, BIM now?
OP: It was recognised that managing the business infrastructure, or what you called Facilities, was crucial to business success and that business in general was not competent to be in control of the infrastructure; that was a job for the professionals. Standards were therefore agreed that would be enforced and business could use. GIBIM are responsible for providing those standards worldwide.
TCB: So how does that work with the clients then? How do they choose the supplier?
OP: They don’t. They are allowed to use what they qualify for according to their business and their meeting the relevant KPIs. Let me explain: If you are starting a new business you produce your business plan and apply locally to have the plan approved. If your business plan meets the standards then you will be allowed to start up when suitable premises are available. If you succeed and maintain a profitable business and meet all of your BIM KPIs then you can continue indefinitely, but you must keep above the relegation zone. If you fall into that area then you will lose your place to a new business. On the other hand, if your business is very successful and you want to grow, then you compete for promotion to larger or better premises from a business in a higher division that has performed poorly and has been relegated.
TCB: So business is only allowed to run as long as they meet these KPIs?
OP: That’s right. It came out of what you will know as HSE. The idea of a Competent Person threw into light the fact that few business people were competent to be responsible for what you called Facilities, especially in terms of environmental concerns. The logical step was to reverse the relationship and have competent people running the business infrastructure along lines that were efficient and contributed positively to the environment and then to allow business to use that infrastructure, but only if their performance was good enough. It was probably the only good thing that came out of the nonsense that you call HSE.
TCB: But HSE isn’t a nonsense! Well, some of it is a bit over the top, but it’s important stuff.
OP: Some of the basic principles are correct, but the culture of litigation that it allowed was ridiculous. People have to take responsibility for their own actions. In our world, if you have an accident at work where you are to blame you take the consequences.
TCB: So what are these KPIs?
OP: Some are related to general business performance in the relevant field; they have to make profit for example, but in relation to us they have to behave as a responsible client.
TCB: What does that mean?
OP: Well for a start they treat the premises and the BIM people that operate them with respect. They will be scored down on issues like damaging the building in any way, abusing BIM employees, failing to observe BIM rules on use of the building and so on.
TCB: (sounding puzzled) So BIM rules would be things like access control and meeting rooms?
OP: Exactly! Failure to display your building pass would be a contravention, as would failure to turn up when you have a meeting room or desk booked. And environmental non compliances carry heavy penalty scores; using the wrong recycling box, not turning a device off and so on. Safety failures also are heavily penalised; say you hurt your back lifting something. You will have been given lifting and handling training as a matter of course, so if you do it wrong and hurt yourself, your salary will be docked by the cost of replacing you. Your employer will fail their KPIs as well.
TCB: Isn’t that unfair under your rules to penalise the employer for the employee’s error?
OP: I see what you mean, but they have to be penalised for employing an idiot. It teaches them to be more careful about who they take on.
TCB: So if the clients can’t choose their suppliers, how does the supply side work now?
OP: The supply side is still competitive in that the people who work in it compete for the jobs. There is a pool of suppliers who provide the services in each country. They take a fixed fee per square metre for supplying and running the services, but they run as not for profit concerns as a public service. There are only the required number of jobs to provide the services though, and competition to win them is strong as they are well paid and much sought after. BIM is a well respected profession these days.
TCB: And this is global now?
OP: Well not quite. The EU started it and the Americans and Japan fell in step because they had to. Pretty much all of the old Commonwealth came on board with the UK and then others get drawn in because it’s where the world trades now; if you’re out you’re out, and that means that no people or goods can move from or to the Alliance countries from outside the Alliance.
TCB: So what about some of the countries that were causing environmental concerns?
OP: Well there were some issues about fencing them off, but then sport entered the picture and exclusion was easy.
TCB: Sport?
OP: Oh yes. The major soccer playing EU nations realised that excluding Brazil from the Alliance meant that they would not be able to play in the World Cup, and once that happened then the athletics people realised that they could have some of the serial Olympic winners banned and that was that. There was even a move to have the Yanks chucked back out at one time, but that was never going to happen.
TCB: So what about the Euro Zone crisis?
OP: Well that was easily solved. We just looked back to the colonial model and when a country got bailed out it was basically bought, so Germany and the UK pretty much own most of the EU between them now. The pound and the mark have parity and all of the EU uses one or the other.
TCB: You mentioned architects?
OP: Yes, well the old days of building monstrosities that took months to turn into workable buildings have long gone. Now we have standards for buildings in each usage type and only a certain number of each are built in different sizes in each area so that there is none of the old nonsense of oversupply; we just have what we need. Building stock is changed as and when necessary, but new build has to be to the standard. The only variation is in the external cladding, and here some flexibility is allowed, but only within limits; King Charles saw to that by Royal Decree in the UK and other countries followed suit.
TCB: King Charles? You mean…
OP: Yes, he’s still with us. Just. Now about your fee for speaking at our conference: For a half hour slot we would be happy to offer you…
Mrs TCB looks down at the slumbering figure and gently lifts the laptop off him. “I do wish he wouldn’t snore so loudly” she complains to the watching cat….
great customer service starts from the top
Customer service has been prominent in my thoughts this week, especially as I have experienced some really good service, together with someone trying to put right something that had gone wrong.
Many years ago I came up with something that I called the Ghent Agenda, named in honour of some really good service I had experienced from hotel people first in Brussels and then in Ghent. It was a blueprint for our facilities management team to raise our game, and it did make a difference, but it is how you make these things happen that intrigues me.
It is the leader that sets the tone for the way their team will work, and various old and new adages describe this; setting the tone, leading by example, walking the talk and so on, and these are, like all such sayings, very true. More so than many realise, because the way a leader acts and behaves will have a huge influence on their team (very much in the way that children are influenced by their parents).
It is all very well to try and influence your team towards providing a high level of service, but how do you yourself behave? Is the example that you set one that you would like your team to follow as they deal with your customers? For example, how do you treat people? You may be good with your team, but how about others?
My premise here is that leading by example, or whatever we want to call it, comes from setting a personal standard first. If you truly want to be a role model then you have to become that model and apply the standard. There is a wonderful quote attributed to Sir Laurence Olivier during the making of the 1976 film Marathon Man. Dustin Hoffman’s character had to portray levels of exhaustion commensurate with having being awake for 24 hours or so, and kept himself up to experience the effects. When Olivier asked him what he was doing Hoffman explained his need for accuracy in portrayal, only for the former to suggest “Why not try acting, dear boy, it’s much easier”.
And that is the issue, acting is much easier, but leadership is not acting. If all you are portraying to your team is an act then you will be found out at some point, so you do need to live the role.
If your team here you tell them about the importance of giving good customer service, of treating people with respect, but then see you behave poorly towards others then how can they truly believe in the message when the person delivering it lets them down? And if you do not strive to apply the standards to yourself in everything that you do, are you not applying double standards?
We can’t be perfect. We are, after all, only human, but if we are going to try to achieve the highest standards then we have to raise our game. A record of continuous success does not come without constantly pushing yourself and your team, and that is what the better leaders do, and they push themselves hardest.
If you want to be that great role model for your people then try to apply the highest levels of behaviour in everything that you do; be polite and show respect to others, regardless of who they are. If you treat the ticket collector on the train or the barista in the coffee shop the way you want your people to treat your customers then you are setting the right tone for them. Lead from the front.
future proof your projects; spend now to save later
When we are up against it on funding we look to cut back on project spend. That is a natural course of action and can usually be effective, at least in terms of meeting the short term objective, but therein lays a problem; short term thinking is nearly always costly in the long term.
There is an old saying about never putting off until tomorrow what you should do today, and that is very relevant in the world of facilities maintenance; you run a fine line between fiscal prudence and neglect. I wrote recently about a building that we took over where we had to take two of the three lifts out of service immediately because they had serious problems resulting from cutting back on regular maintenance.
Another area of cutting back is on specifications, where reducing the scope can reduce the cost proportionately, at least for that project, but somewhere down the road things will bite you. Another example from my vault on this one is where we had to renew the ceilings in a building because of asbestos removal. As we started to take the grid down we had a serious collapse; every time there had been a cabling change the wires had been cut at each end and the cable left up there because “it was cheaper”. Cheaper than doing the job properly that is, but we made a few quid on all the scrap mind you.
That particular project got me thinking. It was early in my time of having, what we called at the time, building maintenance under my control. On being told that we had to put in new cabling about every 18 months for some project or other, and knowing that there was a plethora of projects in the pipeline, I asked for additional cable runs and pulls to be installed as we put the new ceiling up. It cost about 10% extra on the original project budget and I had to find that from somewhere, but over the next 8 years that I was involved with that building we added extra cable capacity for a fraction of what it had been costing us and with almost no disruption.
That is a small example of what I came to call future proofing projects, and we applied the principle across everything that we did. What did we have to do and how could we make our lives easier downstream? How much to put in twice the capacity; three times the capacity? Make a judgement call on it. Refurbishing accommodation is always a golden opportunity to look to the future and spend a little more than you need to in order to save money in the coming years.
Where you can save money without too much risk is to reduce demand, or consumption, and this is where you can also contribute to environmental targets as well as cost savings and this is something that you should be doing as routine, but then you need a big number you normally a choice; either you nibble away at everything and take a bit off or you take a deep breath and cancel a project (or two) to give you the right number.
I would always go for that latter option to give me the headroom that I need, but making sure that it included enough cash to do some future proofing. And because future proofing means that some of the things that you be asked to look at next year or the year after can be easily accommodated you can look good when you say “no problem”.
does your meeting space facilitate good decisions
Meetings are a fact of modern business life; they are one of the catalysts that help move business forward by getting people together sparking ideas, planning strategy and similar dynamic activity, or at least they should be, but all too often they are nothing more than a waste of everyone’s time.
Some of the reasons for meetings failing are in poor planning, preparation, chairing and team issues, but what I want to look at here is the room itself because that is something that facilities teams can influence and make a bigger contribution to business success that we might realise.
Often meeting space is fitted in around the office as best as we can rather than consciously designed and I’ve seen some horrors over the years. As an example, let me first set the scene: We were bidding to win the outsourcing of a service for an international business. On offer was a 3 year deal with options for extension, but the basic contract was worth around £5m. We were invited to present for 40 minutes plus 20 for questions, told we could bring 4 people and use an SVGA presenter. All pretty standard for such a session and we turned up prepared and rehearsed.
We were taken up to the room on an upper floor and on the corner of the building. As the door opened we could see that it was long and narrow. Three tables were end to end down the middle with 6 chairs either side and one at each end, and 11 of these were occupied. The door was in one of the short walls and one long wall and short wall opposite the door were windows through which the low winter sun streamed.
So basic maths will show that there weren’t enough seats, and common sense will tell you that we couldn’t project onto the door with any degree of success and to project on to the one possible wall meant that half the people would have to turn around and, in any case, the sunlight would wash out the slides.
As Bid Director I had covered for not being able to run the presentation; it’s always a risk, so you prepare for it. I’m also used to standing to present, so standing against the door for the hour that we were there was not really an issue even if it was unusual. As for the outcome, well, we got into the final two, so we did OK in difficult circumstances, but what was the point in making use of such a room for the buying team? The people facing the windows were covering their eyes a lot of the time to avoid being blinded and the solar gain was making the room like a sweatbox. We were only there for an hour, but they had five presentations to sit through and debate on, and I would question the quality of the decision making under such conditions of discomfort.
This is an extreme case, but I’ve encountered poor facilities in many offices and hotels that I have visited over the years. The point is that meetings are about human interaction, so having the right sort of space for people to interact in is crucial to making meetings successful. As FMs we can look at providing spaces that can be used flexibly and provide an environment in which people can be productive and contribute.
Decent meeting space is an investment, but it costs about the same to do it right as to do it wrong, so it’s well worth looking at if you can.
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