Industry experts discuss the critical importance of aligning facility management performance metrics with the specific needs and "why" of the demand organization. By focusing on mission impact rather than just technical data, FMs can better justify resources and demonstrate true strategic value.
In today's episode, Eric Dillinger, Vice President of Strategic Consulting at Woolpert and current Convenor for the ISO/TC 267 working group, sits down with industry leaders Skip Vaughn, Assistant Vice President of Facilities Management at American University and member of the U.S. Technical Advisory Group for ISO/TC 267, and Mike Tasker, the Director of Aviation Maintenance for the Port of Seattle , who brings over 30 years of expertise spanning Navy nuclear power to airport infrastructure.
Together, they explore the critical alignment between facilities management and the "Demand Organization." They dive into the challenges of defining "uptime," aligning facility management performance metrics with your facility's mission , and how FMs can better justify resources and demonstrate true strategic value.
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Time Stamps:
Mike Tasker: [00:00:00] The challenge with uptime is you have to have a definition of uptime that the man organization understands, because if people don't understand, if you've taken something down for maintenance, it shouldn't count against uptime.
It's a key thing from the FM side is to ensure your organization understands what uptime is because there's an expectation a lot of times from the demand organization that nothing can ever be down. Right? And we know that that doesn't work. 'Cause if you want to maintain something, sometimes it has to be taken outta service to be maintained.
So that's the connection to the demand organization to make sure that you're on the same page when you're talking uptime.
Host: Welcome to Connected fm, a podcast connecting you to the latest insights, tools, and resources to help you succeed in facility management. This podcast is brought to you by ifma, the leading professional association for facility manager. [00:01:00] If you are ready to grow your network and advance in your career, go to ifma.org to get started.
In today's episode, Eric Dillinger, vice President of Strategic Consulting at Wilpert and current convener for the ISO/TC 267 working group sits down with industry leaders. Skip Vaughn, the Assistant Vice President of Facilities Management at American University, and also a member of the US Technical Advisory Group for ISO/TC 267.
And Mike Tasker, the director of Aviation Maintenance for the Port of Seattle. Together, they explore the critical alignment between facilities management and the demand organization, and they dive into the challenges of defining uptime, aligning facility management performance metrics with your facility's mission and how FMS can better justify resources and demonstrate.
True strategic value. Now let's get into it.
Eric Dillinger: I'm Eric Dillinger with ISO and also ifma, [00:02:00] and I'm joined today by Skip Vaughn and Mike Tasker. I chair the working group for performance management and measurement on behalf of ISO. Skip is part of that committee and also is one of the members of the Academic Council for ifma and Mike Tasker is the president of the IFMA Airport Facilities Council.
They each sit in unique and pretty complex roles. In Mike's case, running one of the nation's largest airports. Skip's case experience with NIST and more recently with American University. And what we'd like to discuss for you today is how performance management and measurement standards and frameworks for decision making are established and how critical it is to align those.
To the organization you support as a facility manager and in ISO we call that organization the Demand Organization. So you'll hear us speak about that a little bit. So what I'd like to start off with is asking Skip a little bit [00:03:00] about how American University and maybe even National Institute of Standards and Technology aligned their performance management from an FM standpoint to their demand organization and skip dive in from that.
Skip Vaughn: Alright, great. Thanks Eric uh, it's a pleasure to be here today. So I wanna start off a little bit back with my time at nist. So one of the things when you look at the ISO standards, everything starts with, you know, alignment in developing a strategic plan for your facilities management organization with that of your demand organization.
So you really have to understand your demand organization. How do you support them facilities, we are a support organization. And you know, NIST had six different laboratories. Each one could be its own individual agency. That's how various the specialties of each of them work. And so I ended up working with each of the laboratories to fully understand, you know, how is it I align the work that I'm doing to best support them.
And it [00:04:00] differed from laboratory to laboratory. So shifting gears and coming over to American University you know, I, I started meeting with all my different demand organization, peers. So academic buildings are gonna have different requirements that's gonna support them from athletics.
It's gonna be different from residential. And so making sure that, you know, for each one of my internal customers, I'm aligning the work that we're doing that best supports them. You know, if they're not being successful, the university's not being successful. And so that's bare bones as I can make it.
Eric Dillinger: Mike, compare that to the Navy or the Air, air Aviation Universe
Mike Tasker: Airport. Yeah. Very similar. And again, thanks Eric for this opportunity and this is kinda fun opportunity to, to share some experiences with the other fm staff and people doing this fun role. But yeah, at the International Airport, our demand organization is multiple people.
It's the traveling public, it's the airline, it's the operations department. And [00:05:00] each one of those have, you know, different requirements. And, you know, people talk about. You know, the airport, you know, restrooms are one of the most important things. It's the last thing you see. It's the last thing you use.
It's the first thing you use when you get on the plane. And then it's, you know, passenger loading bridges. It's the runways. It's a requirement to ensure it runs 24 7. Right. Basically everything has to run so we have to align our metrics and our data and our resources to ensure those things happen.
And with that, you know, you, you stick talked about a little bit of strategic versus tactical and those things, and you have to manage those to ensure all those things align to ensure that the demand organization can take it for granted. And then with the Navy, I had a similar role for Puget Sound, Naval Shipyard.
Very similar, you know, shipyards, the dry docks. It's kind of, you know, kind like at the airport is the facility person. And people have to say, I do maintenance at Seattle to come international airport. I don't work on the airplanes. You know, we ensure the [00:06:00] facilities are available for the passengers to fly.
And there's facilities for people to work on the planes. But Puget Sound, Naval Shipyard. Dry docks very similar, and it's amazing how the roles are similar, but there's connected pieces where we were responsible for aerial work platform recertifications. You know, they're, they have lifting elements, et cetera.
Our aerial work platforms were a critical asset for them to work on ships in the shipyard, in, in the dry dock. So you, we had to work those lean things out. So there was a lot of connections and managing FM performance to the demand organization.
Eric Dillinger: As you look at those, and I hear you talking about defining their critical systems and their critical pieces, are there some specific examples where you've seen it work or not work to connect a demand organization goal or objective, and the FM goals and objectives that you had within it?
Mike Tasker: Yeah, [00:07:00] it's, yes. You know, there's, there's, there, there's examples. You know, there's pros and cons. There's so good and bad examples. And some of the stuff, the challenge is, we mentioned restrooms and restroom, cleanliness. You know, how do you track that? What are the best metrics with that? And and sometimes you have to bring the metrics down to as simple as.
The smiley face, you know, a flat face or a frowny face. Because when you're working with demand organization, it's critical to know what metrics you need to measure, right? One of the key elements is if you want to manage, you need to measure it. What is the appropriate level of measurement and what do you need to measure?
And you can spend a whole bunch of time. Trying to figure those things out. Sometimes it's just as simple as the customer or the demand organization happy or are they not happy. And with that you can work on managing expectations because sometimes if you, you know, work with your demand organization and you can get them to understand the complexities and challenges, you can manage the expectations such [00:08:00] that when they understand.
If someone's pushing the smiley face button on the restroom, you've met the bar. But if everybody's, you know, pushing the frowny face button when they're leaving the restroom, you and the FM world have a whole lot more to do cleaning schedule, you know, ensuring the toilets and the flesh valves, the potential.
All those things are working appropriately and how you're tracking that and tracking those in the detail. But yeah. Sometimes it's simple, sometimes not so much.
Eric Dillinger: No, I like that characterization because you could clean it 20 times, but if you can't get a happy face, you're not really achieving the outcome.
And so Exactly. So I think that's real thoughtful. Skip maybe something similar that you've encountered.
Skip Vaughn: Well, for me I'd say it's how am I making sure that I'm looking at the things that. Leadership's gonna value because when you're in higher education first appearances [00:09:00] are, you know, so important.
It's what's the visual, whether it's the public, whether it's incoming students, whether it's the alumni. And so, you know. Kind of similar to Mike's example with talking about, getting the, the smiley versus the frowny face. It's what are the things that are gonna be on the appearance wise you know, in, in higher education.
So, And one of the things in higher education is there's an organization called apa, which is basically facilities management for higher education. And so they have definitions for all the APA levels, for grounds work, for custodial, for building operations and maintenance. And so.
Making sure that we're aligning our actual performance with their, qualitative descriptions. So that way when you're taking a look at, what's of value to the organization, to leadership and trying to get that public perception is, well, what do we wanna fund? Do we want to fund, absolutely immaculate bathrooms or [00:10:00] hey, it's a pretty good, it's, you know, it's somewhere between the, the super smiley face and the, the halfway happy face. So the good thing on higher ed is there are those qualitative measures that you can get alignment with leadership, with what they wanna see from the general public and the student body when they're visiting your facilities.
Eric Dillinger: It's interesting, I've actually read studies that get at what you're describing that students and parents often pick the academic institution that they desire to attend. Mm-hmm. Based more on the visual appearance because they don't really have a context for looking at the different educational programs in detail.
And they may never know that the mechanical room that they don't see. Is in good or bad conditions. So again, kind of tuning those metrics. In the early part of your comment there, skip, you talked a little bit about how you show leadership that you're providing that value. Maybe pull on that thread a little bit more and talk about how you measure [00:11:00] value and get the leadership to measure it.
Skip Vaughn: Sure. Kind of breaking that down into three different categories, economic, social, environmental so higher ed. They gotta make sure that they, especially in a private institution, you gotta make sure that you're solving and so huge, huge focus on the budget. Not to say that's not in the, the public institutions as well.
But it's even more so in the, the private universities. So utility costs are typically anywhere from 25 to 40% of any FM's budget. In higher education. So one of the things we really wanna take a look at is how are we reducing utility costs? The CFO, one of the things they're taking a look at is year to year, how are we doing on our utility costs?
They don't want to hear that, Hey, it's projected to go up 22% for electricity this year. So you gotta increase my budget. They don't want to hear that. They wanna see year over year. How are we doing on those utility costs? What are you doing to bring those down? That impacts the bottom line. Another [00:12:00] thing is, you know, how are we reducing er emergency and reactive maintenance costs?
Because those are gonna be a lot more expensive than a preventive maintenance. So rather than focusing on, Hey, here's how we're doing our preventive maintenance, it's, you know, they wanna see it other on the other end. And then another big one for higher ed is reducing waste management costs. So there, you know, huge push with zero waste programs across higher ed.
To reduce those costs. Looking at it through the social lens is, we really wanna make sure that we've got the local community support. So how are we holding community events that are supporting sustainability? That is part of the culture at American University is sustainability. So we really need to be making sure that we're getting lots of opportunities for involvement, not only the student body, but also the general neighborhoods to come and participate in events, to show that we're being a good neighbor with them.
Then the third category with environmental kind of goes [00:13:00] back to the sustainability is how are we doing on maintaining our carbon neutrality goals? You know, we're the first university in the country that went, that went carbon neutral. How are we making sure that we're maintaining that? What are those waste diversion rates to show that we're really focusing on that as a university?
So I'd say those are the items in those three categories that really, really matter to leadership at au.
Eric Dillinger: Yeah. And connecting 'em makes sense. I know Mike up in the Pacific Northwest, I think a lot of those same concerns play out, you know, for the airport and the region. So maybe some thoughts along those same lines.
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Mike Tasker: It's very similar and again, it's, you know, without Skip and I having, , talking about this, it sounds like, wow, it sounds very similar. We have, you know, in Pacific, Northwest Washington, evergreen, in a lot of our environmental initiatives, carbon reduction, waste reduction.
There are a lot of metrics we track on the energy utilization. We have what's called, clean buildings here in Washington State where they're managing energy, you know, e UIs, energy utilization, intensities, and there, there, there's a lot of things that they're [00:15:00] tracking there, from the demand organization where you know, they're, they're also looking at costs, right?
And we're looking at custodial costs. What are our costs per square foot? What are our overtime costs? And then there's uptime, you know, back to the, they wanna take the facilities for granted, so they're tracking. How often are your elevators and escalators up? The challenge with uptime is you have to have a definition of uptime that the man organization understands, because if people don't understand, if you've taken something down for maintenance, it shouldn't count against uptime.
It's a key thing from the FM side is to ensure your organization understands what uptime is because there's an expectation a lot of times from the demand organization that nothing can ever be down. Right? And we know that that doesn't work. So it's back to, you know, 'cause if you want to maintain something, sometimes it has to be taken outta service to be maintained.
So that's the connection to the demand organization to make sure that you're on the same page when you're talking [00:16:00] uptime. So when you're tracking those metrics that they have an understanding that you're not being harshly penalized for something that they understand that, that you have to do to keep the facility working.
And a lot of times those, they have to be scheduled. So operationally, everybody understands when you're taking something out of service. It has to be done and we've work around it and it doesn't impact the organization. So the demand organization is not impacted. All the stuff that skip talk very similar, the same thing.
And, you know, how do we show value again for us is to, to do all the fm to do all those metrics behind the scene. And again, skip and I had to laugh about one that we talked about before is managing metrics and um, showing value where. When I got into my role, we were checking, you know, Maximo and how, how many work orders we were completing on time.
We had this percentage that, that we showed, that we were completing 94% of our work orders on time. And I look, I go, that means we have too much staff. I'm like, what is this? You know, you know, we wanna say we're doing a good job, you [00:17:00] know, here, look at us in doing a good job. If you one more link, it was. We were not doing 52% of the PMs we needed and we were getting 94% of the 48% that we were doing on time.
And I'm looking, I go, what is the better lie to tell? Right? You're either getting all your stuff done on time and you have too many staff to make yourself look good for the organization, or you need staff. You can't have it both ways. And I said for us, it's better to be honest. So you can leverage that backlog to generate resources to ensure you can keep the facilities working in the way they're at.
But yeah, metrics are so important and you know, us being military or background guys, you know, we said gun deck. You know, gun decking is where someone basically falsifies logs and does something where try to make themselves look good. In our world, don't do that. Be accurate. Be honest. If it's a bad story to tell, it's a bad story to tell, but sometimes bad [00:18:00] stories get you resources if it's a good story to tell.
And again, if you're, if your demand organization, you know, is trusting, you're doing good work, you have the data that's true, honest, and it'll justify resources and it'll tell your story.
Eric Dillinger: I like and I wanna tug on a little more of your comment about uptime. I think too often fms feel like they're underfunded, but they don't really show up with the discussion of do have this level of uptime.
Is an associated price point, level performance level service. And the more you can articulate if you want the escalator to never fail, this is the price point. And people look at that price point and say, wow, that's too much. Okay, so how much uptime or availability would you like to have? And you start to then align that demand organization a little bit, which I think is a great insight as, as people take that on.
Um, As you think about, and maybe Mike, just keep pulling out a little bit, if you had some advice for FMS that might spend the time to hear this [00:19:00] podcast on performance management and measurement, what's the top thoughts you'd offer 'em, regardless of the industry they support?
Mike Tasker: And it's, it's, it's understanding the demand organization and, you know, some of the stuff that, you know, a lot of leadership background, you know, people follow Simon Sinek.
Begin with the why. You know, if you follow any of that, you know, in, in, in our positions and leaders, we should always be working on our leadership when we're trying to lead different parts of the organization. And we can always improve as leaders, but understand the why. You have to know the why,
why do we want the airport to run 24 7? What is, it's the economic engine. Why does it have to do that? Because the why will get you to the what and the what is the connection between the demand organization and your FM organization on what you have to do to ensure the why gets met. And there's a lot of stuff behind the why.
You can be environmental, you can be social. There's a lot of things that you do that we as an organization, support. At the demand [00:20:00]organization that we have to connect our what to. So it's very important to understand the why, because a lot of times in our world in FM resources are always a challenge.
You know, when you have an employee who is running from job to job trying to get stuff done. You know, you've heard the adage if you didn't, you know, picture or didn't happen, right? There's a lot of stuff that we do. We keep the facilities running. But we don't have the time to document. It's back to if you didn't document it, it didn't happen, right?
So people have to understand the why, to ensure they slow down enough to do the documentation, to tell the story, to have the data to connect to the demand organization, to show the output. A lot of connection there, but it starts with understanding the why of the demand organization.
Skip Vaughn: I love that. Skip, maybe from your [00:21:00] perspective.
So I just actually want to expand a little bit on what, what Mike was sharing there. So, you know, for the viewers just one little bit of tidbit about Eric and myself and our. How we initially met is, so when I was at nist, I hired the National Academy of Science, engineering and Medicine to come and do a technical assessment of NIST facilities.
And one of the, I think one of the most important things that came out of that was to get us in facilities to focus on the mission impact. You know, we can talk all day long about here's our deferred maintenance and here's this and here's that. What's the real impact to the mission of the organization?
And so there was a lot of questioning of researchers. We did 44 lab tours asking researchers, you know, Hey, based on all these different types of things you know, it's from, you know, if you have really, really high end science, you know, a half a degree of temperature change or a 10th of a percent of humidity can ruin an experiment.
Those tiny little blips in [00:22:00] power, if you don't have a hundred percent clean power. But then there's the stuff that everybody in facilities is used to, the floods, the power outages, you know, stuff like that. And what we discovered was, you know, just trying to take some qualitative information, trying to turn it into quantitative, was.
Between 200 and $250 million of world-class researcher, labor was being wasted every single year because of facility impacts. So now they have to redo experiments over and over and over again. They just lost a year's worth of work. They have to completely restart. So, I mean, knowing what is gonna be the biggest impact on each individual type of lab.
So you can really focus in back to Mike's point about the what and the why. Really have to understand. So that starts to focus your energies as the fm. And that just completely changed the way that we started to [00:23:00] prioritize and re revise our strategic plan in best supporting our demand organizations.
Eric Dillinger: I love that connection. I mean, the why is why facilities exist that we typically operate and it's rarely to have facilities. And connecting that to Mission, which I've heard both of you do on numerous occasions, I think really is what the demand organization has to hear is a performance management framework, because then the uptime that you're trying to achieve is to deliver world-class transportation.
Safe and reliable. Transits, good bathrooms. The lab that runs things like the atomic clock that gets millions more hits than all of Google.
Skip Vaughn: Billions,
Eric Dillinger: billions more hits than all of Google. I mean, you're doing stuff like that and that's why the facilities management has happened, and so I think that's fabulous.
I really appreciate both of you taking the time to sit down. Run through this a little [00:24:00] bit. For those of you watching that, some world class experts here that are available to you as peers and as thought leaders inside IFMA that I encourage you to connect with and take advantage of their expertise. And with that, I think we're concluded.
Thank you.
Skip Vaughn: Thank you everybody.
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