the barista in me.. surprised am I!

No I never thought that i would be making coffee and selling it. but that is  reality since AIUK, remodelled its computer resource centre/ library in to a coffee shop

this time last year i was visiting canary wharf about once a week hoping to get a job with LOCOG, that disappointingly never happened.

But 12 months later I'm at Amnesty,survived two re-organisations, did my NEBOSH, L8 awareness, gender and mentor training and next week I'm doing DSE at workplace law for 2 days and I make coffee, sell sandwiches, chocolate, muffins and cash up... never thought i would be handling cash in an FM role.

But I think I came out on top and I love my job in Amnesty, my view of FM up to being made redundant was just hard services and hard services from a very niche standpoint..

tbc...............30/01/13 21:20hrs

benchmarking

I'm about to set out on this little, task for a number of services.

Some i'm looking at, I'll try to bundle together, like cctv, fire alarm (red care), intruder alarm and access control system.
L8 is pretty much self explanatory,  as is anything to do with plumbing and electrical.

if my bench marking is all about getting best price, then that's all i'm looking at in my benchmarking process along with the way the quote is presented and reputation.

Facilities Management is not hard

Being a facilities manager is not difficult, providing you have a full set off tools available.
A lot of fm is all about finding solutions to problems and 'lessons learnt', lots of the problems re-occur/ are repetitive, but once one has learnt the lesson, re-read the script and repeat the process in less time, for a quick solution.
The tool kit can be anything from literally tools to service providers, access to parts suppliers or the ultimate a total facilities management provider, if your business can afford it.
Its also is your common sense and expertise in the FM field from some sort of perspective


 we have to innovate as well where unusual situations occur, normally more than once at a time, the other week I was trying to sort a spreadsheet and budgets out, then it was discovered one of our showers had been left on and was trying to flood our basement, adjacent to our data centre. needless to say i dropped everything to mop up the mess and pulled another of my staff members off other tasks, as this was importanat and the only wet vac we had was useless.


That's what doing FM is like, diverse, multifaceted, innovative, one needs to be FM smart, think out of the box, use investigative root cause analysis techniques, i believe my back ground in electrical/ mechanical/electronics/ maintenance/ engineering/ IT technology is an ideal background and expertise.
keep it simple keep it #fm#noreinventingthewheelthanks

looking forward to 2013

back to work on weds 3rd Jan, i wonder what the building mods will look like and if they are finished

its going to be an exciting 6 months to come if only that i have a load of hard service contrcts to sort out

our waste provider is changing on 5th Jan and there are other soft services i'm looking at to make more efficient and save costs

and i personally have a number of hurdles to cross this year; the result of my NEBOSH is due by mid Feb, my birthday the same month and later in the year a life changing event, that will mean i'll be off work for a while.. scary and yet excited..!

and i need to blog more to keep up with Jason

happy new year to all,i hope your dreams are fulfilled... and stay safe

Service Level Agreements

This is my response to Jason Gurd's latest post.... 
http://everythingfacilities.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/slave-to-convention.html


SLA's are great for setting expectations, "we will arrive on site within 4 hrs of a callout being logged" that gives peace of mind to the buyer of the service.
And the message can be relayed to the end user, so they have a rough idea, when their problem will be looked at.
that is total quality management

I've never (apart from one, 2 month post) been involved with a contract that had financial penalties built into it, so very often even though these callout response times were set in the SLA, the supplier would not meet them because of other business commitments, therefore maybe that is the time for a financial penalty and or pay for a premium service, dependent on the importance of the kit and faults to be fixed.
So one could argue that the SLA is used as a big stick (not literally)by the customer to make sure the supplier delivers the service that is expected and needed.

The 2 month thing i referred to above, had kpi's built into the sla from all directions and with financial penalties as well, some realistic, a few not.. Not sure of its use, the customer liked it though as it gave them a measure of the efficiency of the contract.

so my view is the SLA'a can be an instrument of use, that result in total quality management solution, they can be good and bad, but from a client perspective, if the trusting relationship was better, then maybe they are not needed... and then.....

Having sat on both sides of the fence i can see their merit, but do we need to re-invent the wheel?

If suppliers/ service providers were 100% efficient and trustworthy, then a PO will suffice, well almost.