Talk:Facility management/Archive 1

Facility Management

Facility Management or Facility & Property Management are more commonly defined as — Preceding unsigned comment added by Amman63 (talk • contribs) 17:27, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Text

An integrated approach to planning and delivering the agreed services that support an organisation’s primary activities. This includes developing and implementing policies, standards and processes that enable the organisation to adapt to change and improve effectiveness. Facilities Management: This term is used synonymously with Facilities Management.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.183.152.135 (talk • contribs) 11:40, 24 November 2004

This subject is of high importance to many organisations throughout the world as the cost of property is often only second to staff costs. Therefore, a simple way of explaining the workings of facilities management is highly desirable. This currently is poorly served both in this article and in many other associated articles on the subject and should be addressed. Sidpickle (talk) 20:45, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Vandalism

This page (specifically under "Role" heading) has been vandalized. Within there are missing sentences that have been replaced with '( )'s and "I love penis" etc. Reid Sullivan (talk) 14:45, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Feb/March 2013 Edits - Comments

Various changes have been made to article by someone with perhaps limited experience of Facilities Management. It is a very wide ranging discipline and the use of bullet points can take to reader to important documents such as standards and regulations. Rather than just deleting them perhaps whoever took them out would like to first put in a suitable replacement before destroying the work? Sidpickle (talk) 14:54, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

This is an encyclopedia article, not webpage that hosts a bare list of references to materials on a topic. --Ronz (talk) 17:13, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

Let's not make a big deal about deleting the information - there's not much there and it's done extremely poorly. It's not as if the material cannot be easily accessed. It might be helpful to make a list of the potential sources here on the talk page for easier reference.

I suggest starting with a single subtopic and expanding upon it properly, rather than turning this article into what looks at best like an outline. --Ronz (talk) 18:32, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

I've added some text but from experience I know this page is targeted by the "trade" and vandals and I have always been reluctant to spent too much time on it. I have added some text but if you want to start again I have no problem. One other issue is that UK and USA are different and being in the UK I have only access to our version of things so you really need a USA author to get involved. Sidpickle (talk) 19:08, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

I have added some more text but needs some assurance that this is the way forward or am I wasting my time?. We probably all have different opinions on how which direction this article should take. We could look at the BIG issues of property management: strategic issues, whereas I am looking more at operational aspects of FM. Sidpickle (talk) 13:15, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Basically I agree with the edits of Toddst1 and Ronz, but the result of just deleting the material is not really satisfactory--precisely because it talks about specific UK standards, and does not give links of any sort to the more detailed articles. But this indeed ought to be about the big issues of property management, not the operational aspects. That's so for any general article on a very large practical subject.

The guiding policies are the provisions in WP:NOT that this is an encyclopedia, not a web directory or a textbook. This page is intended to look at the general subject, and more specific subject are handled by linking to more specific WP articles. The way we handle differences between countries is to first discuss general matters that apply everywhere, and then have a section for various countries. We normally do not divide the articles into separate ones by country unless the material becomes unmanageably long. Thus, in an article on fire safety, we would have sections on general matter, follow by a section on the UK and one on the US. as well as those from other English-speaking countries, and , as a lesser priority, sections on every country in the world. At some point in its development, we'd probably split out the US and UK and anything else that got too large. . .

I think this needs rewriting from the beginning. Sidpickel, you tell me you have a masters degree in the subject. so you're more of an expert than any of the three of us. But you said also that you have 50 years experience as a manager in the UK, so you are inevitably influenced by your daily work there. I have a feeling you may have taught courses, formal or informal, in this subject, for you have organized the article as you would organize a series of beginning lectures to non-academic beginners in the UK. The place for that sort of material is Wikiversity. Sid, instead, could you do the following:

• One, write a few paragraphs discussing what in fact the broad principles are that would apply anywhere. Give references to a range of general textbooks, UK and US. (I can add some US ones if you do not know them.)
• Two, tell what the specific divisions of the subject are. There are two ways to do this. One is as an outline, where the links are to the specific wp articles. An example of that style is Outline of Finance. The other is the technique at WP:Summary style, sections which contain as their headings links to the next most detailed layer of articles -- an example is Finance. They can co-exist. But normally what is best to work on first is the article, not the outline. I can clean this up after you start it. Btw, many of the specific articles are also UK oriented. Even if the Canada, US, etc. sections cannot be written art the moment, the need for them should be indicated in the hope of attracting attention.
• Three, However it is organized, there should not be links to standards in such a general article--unless there is indeed a general standard.

DGG ( talk ) 22:35, 8 March 2013 (UTC)

Hello again. I assume we all agree that any article should be understood by those who have little or no knowledge of the subject. I do know that in the past the first section of this article confused many casual readers and it is still not easy, but much of the problem is with the industry trying to define a very diverse discipline. Facility Management is not now just about looking after the built environment, it covers an incredibly diverse set of tasks that vary from one sector to the other, so the definitions do not necessarily fit and I am not sure why they even bother trying. To understand facilities management we do need to look at and explain the role of the person that manages the facility - the Facilities Manger and/or the FM department. This person may be working for a blue chip organisation, hospital, college, multi-tenanted office block, shopping mall, etc. and they will be dealing with different areas of responsibility with different priorities. However, there are a core set of duties that they will all have in common and we can outline these to help explain what Facility Management is about albeit in a form of generalization.

I will look in more detail at you suggestions later this week if that is OK? Sidpickle (talk) 14:42, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

PS Do you think that linking to this would help? Health and safety regulations in the United Kingdom or make matters worse? Sidpickle (talk) 17:56, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

Dear DGG. I have been assessing what is available on Wiki that we could link to when this article is restructured as you have suggested. There are articles that we could link to using Outline of Finance format, however, some such as Fire drill are not fit for purpose as the references appear to be out of date and links missing/broken. Also if we do not have an internal Wiki article do we link to the outside world or do we need to write one? Sidpickle (talk) 08:59, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

Dear DGG. I've had a little go at what you suggest and now want some feedback just in case this is not the way forward. Some items are still UK only but these can be tweaked if you think we are going in the right direction. Sidpickle (talk) 15:20, 10 March 2013 (UTC)