Guest editorial

Per Anker Jensen (DTU Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark)

Facilities

ISSN: 0263-2772

Article publication date: 16 February 2021

Issue publication date: 16 February 2021

245

Citation

Jensen, P.A. (2021), "Guest editorial", Facilities, Vol. 39 No. 3/4, pp. 133-135. https://doi.org/10.1108/F-01-2021-159

Publisher

:

Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2020, Emerald Publishing Limited


Knowledge management of the interrelationships between facilities management and building projects

The issue of buildings not being designed and constructed in an operational friendly way has been recognised as a major problem among facilities managers in practice for a long time. This has resulted in development of frameworks aimed at reducing this problem and increasing the quality and performance of buildings, when they are taking into operation. In the USA, Building Commissioning has become widespread by implementing a framework commonly used in shipbuilding and process industry. In the UK, the framework Soft Landings has been developed and achieved some success, including the introduction of Government Soft Landings for public building projects. Sustainability certification is another framework that is gaining increased ground and to a certain degree puts more emphasis on considerations for building operation during design. In the building industry, there has been a hype for some years about Building Information Modelling (BIM) being the solution to bridge the information gap between building projects and building operation.

During the past decade, we have also seen an increasing interest for the issue among researchers. There have been a number of empirical studies focusing mainly on the handover of data and information from building projects to building operation. There has been less focus on how knowledge from facilities management (FM) can be integrated in building design. The same is the case for how operational oriented knowledge can be managed during building projects. In this special issue, we would like to focus on all these three aspects and more generally on knowledge management (KM) of the interrelationships between FM and building projects.

KM is a fairly new field of research with a strong development. The literature on KM in general and the still sparse literature on KM in FM and building projects show that there are two main schools of thought. One school can be characterised as technical-rationalist and focuses on how knowledge can be codified, stored in repositories and transferred from senders to receivers by use of ICT. The other school can be characterised as social-constructivist and perceives knowledge as socially constructed among people, when they interact with each other. I think that both schools can offer important insights to the topic of this special issue.

Four research papers submitted specifically for this special issue have been accepted and are included in this issue of Facilities. The first paper focuses on integrating FM knowledge in design by comparing buildings and ships. The second paper focuses on construction management with the aim to improve project performance and building operation, including involvement of facilities managers in the construction process. The third paper develops a framework for building and property management of state schools. The fourth paper develops a prototype of a BIM system for maintenance management of intelligent building systems (IBS). The first two papers combine the technical-rationalist and social-constructivist approaches, whereas the last two mostly leans towards the technical-rationalist approach. Each of the four papers is briefly introduced below.

The first paper is written by Helle Lohmann Rasmussen and has the title: “The challenge of integrating operational knowledge in building and ship design”. The paper includes an empirical study that compares the integration of FM knowledge in design of buildings and design of ferries with cases from Denmark. The paper builds on a former paper in Facilities by the same author, which presented the tripartite building client distinguishing between top management, operations division and building client division (Rasmussen et al., 2019). In the ship cases, the projects managers were either part of top management or from operations, and their highest concern was the business case with strong focus on operations. Yet, the fewest procedures and tools to integrate operational knowledge in design were implemented in these cases. Contrastingly, in the building cases, where operations were not the main matter of concern of project management, who had a background from construction management, a large number of procedures and tools to integrate operational knowledge in design were implemented. Thus, among the conclusions are, that the organisational affiliation, focus and competences of the client organisation’s project management play an important role in how much effort and resources go into ensuring integration of operational knowledge in the design process.

The second paper is written by Teresa Beste and has the title “Effect of systematic completion on public construction projects”. The focus is on “systematic completion” as a structured process throughout the whole construction project assuring the fulfilment of functional requirements in the building. Systematic completion has emerged over recent years in Norway as a holistic commissioning process with involvement of personnel from operations and focus on sequential testing both during design, including theoretical table tests, and during construction. The paper is based on a case study of four construction projects commissioned by a Norwegian state building client. The projects were investigated by use of document study, interviews and a quantitative survey. The study showed that systematic completion has a positive effect on the performance of a construction project, enabling completion on cost and schedule and high quality with fewer defects at handover. Involving facility management assures mutual learning, trained operations personnel and potentially lower costs of operations because of fewer corrections and optimized systems. Higher efforts and resource use in the early phases of the project and in testing are largely offset by the generated benefits. The study provides insights into the effect of systematic completion on project management performance, especially on its implications for the takeover of the building by operations.

The third paper is written by An Thi Hoai Le, Niluka Domingo, Eziaku Onyeizu Rasheed and Kenneth Sungho Park, and it has the title “Building and Property Management Framework for State Schools in New Zealand”. The paper aims to develop an integrated and comprehensive framework for building and property management of state schools to provide a guide for school managers in New Zealand. The study focuses on asset management and is empirically based on interviews with top managers in state schools. The framework was developed by using the Integration Definition for Process Modelling (IDEF0). The asset management framework is divided in long-term plans for a 10-year period and short-term plans covering five years. The result is a systematic model, including input, output, control and mechanism elements, which can be used as a guide for requirements and decision mapping in building and property management of the schools. The paper highlights the complexity of the building and property management in schools, presents the roles and responsibilities of the school stakeholders and proposes a systematic framework to assist the managers in this management process.

The fourth paper is written by Zul-Atfi Ismaill and has the title “How BIM Systems Affect Maintaining IBS Building”. The focus of the paper is on BIM in relation to maintenance of IBS, and the aim is to enable a change in management practices from a conventional paper-based method to a new digitalized method. The empirical study was based on interviews with eight major maintenance organisations that manage maintenance of complex, high-rise IBS buildings in Malaysia. A prototype of a computerised system was developed using data flow diagram and coding, and the prototype system was subsequently tested. The paper concludes that the digitalised system will make defect diagnosis and the decision-making process easier, faster and more cost-effective, and it may improve the effectiveness of maintenance management practices for IBS buildings.

Reference

Rasmussen, H.L., Jensen, P.A., Nielsen, S.B. and Kristiansen, A.H. (2019), “Initiatives to integrate operational knowledge in design: a building client perspective”, Facilities, Vol. 37 Nos 11/12, pp. 799-812, doi: 10.1108/F-02-2017-0021.

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