Work Management

A fundamental work management task is the ability to convert a customer’s concept into the essential data that defines an achievable task. Customer is a broad term in an educational setting. Work requests come from students, faculty, staff, police and security personnel, library patrons, visitors, governing bodies, or building automation systems. All are facilities management customers. The work management group needs someone, typically service desk staff, to interact with a customer, gather essential data, and authorize and assign the work. Their job may be straightforward when they receive a request such as “Please replace the light that is out in room 202,” or it may begin an iterative process that compiles broad and deep specific information for a request such as “Please design and build a hospital.” Someone in each organization must be responsible for collecting and updating this data and assigning a unique identifier. The identifier may be a project ID or work order number or task order, but it must be easily distinguishable from other work assignments. Each work order contains essential data elements, and the service desk, or its equivalent in your organization, gathers this information.

• Work order number: A work order number uniquely identifies a particular job. This simple device often serves a vital role as a database table’s primary key.
• Emergency: The phone rings. The service desk answers. The caller reports there is water pouring out of the ceiling onto their servers. An emergency work order is a response to an immediate or imminent threat to people or property. Well-trained work management staff focuses on the information needed for an immediate response then follows up to collect other important data elements. Everyone responding to an emergency work order benefits from clear, concise information. Communicating promptly and directly and flagging the work order as an emergency makes that easier. A field that flags emergency work orders is particularly useful for organizations that track emergency response as a key performance indicator or certification criterion.
• Requester: Several people are typically involved in a work request. The work may benefit a faculty member but an account manager and department administrator may also be involved. Among the interested parties is the primary point-of-contact. Home in on this individual and record the person’s name, phone number, e-mail address, and department. Treating this central customer as the requester will likely speed overall communication during the work effort. Get to know requesters and build working relationships with them. Communication improves with someone you know and understand.
• Location: The building or grounds area identification is critical business data for nearly all facilities management organizations. The Postsecondary Education Facilities Inventory and Classification Manual (2006) is a widely accepted standard for defining and classifying educational spaces. Ideally, you are already using this or a similarly well-thought-out data structure for locations. If not, make a plan that implements this data discipline. Building number often serves as a primary key and thus a critical database field. It is not unusual for a geographic information system to take this a step further and physically locate equipment in an exact spot on the earth.

Figure 1. Actual equipment locations are shown in a geographic information system. Design work order, GIS, space, and other information systems to work together. (Used with permission, University of Virginia, 2009)

• Scope: What is it that needs to be done? Capture as much relevant information as possible including requester feedback expectations. It may require several iterations to investigate, design, and execute what is needed. Recording notes at key decision points helps the work team quickly grasp the history and direction of the task at hand.
• Status: The status clarifies the current state of a work order and allows controls to be put in place to satisfy business practices. For example, if the work order status is “Waiting Scheduling,” a business practice can be set to reject labor charges against the work order. Most work order systems provide a record of who changed a work order status and when the change occurred.
• Fund provider and funding identifier: Cost-reimbursable facilities management organizations bill for the work they perform. Charges are typically collected by work order. Some organizations bill as charges are recorded; others set a cyclical billing cycle. The work management group helps those sending the bill determine exactly which account is paying for the work and the nature of the financial agreement. Conventional financial agreements include fixed price, guaranteed maximum price, or time and materials cost reimbursement. In some cases, multiple fund sources are involved. When this occurs, the work management group helps discern if each account is paying a fixed amount or if the accounts are sharing a percentage of the cost. Defining these details early tends to make everyone’s job easier. Even if your facility organization is not cost recoverable, funding discernments remain and are best understood early in the process.
• Budget: Every work order has a budget expectation. Service desk staff needs the training and experience to determine if the budget expectation is understood as part of a normal business practice, or if a more specific budget limitation constrains the work order.
• Schedule: Once a requester defines a scope and believes it to be affordable, the next question is “How soon can the work be done?” The customer may have a particular date in mind or need the work done during an upcoming window of opportunity. The service desk documents the desired schedule and helps frame the customer’s expectation about when something will occur, but often does not set the specific schedule for the groups doing the work.

These are the most basic data elements. After they are collected, the process of authorizing and assigning the work begins. Authorizing a work order requires understanding and seeking necessary permissions. Permissions are frequently tied to financial expenditure levels, but may also be linked to criteria such as institutional priority, consequence of not doing the work, location, or nature of the work. The fewer the permissions required, the more efficient the work order process. It makes sense to empower service desk staff to commit resources to emergency or corrective maintenance work. A computerized maintenance management system may be authorized to release waves of preventive maintenance work orders. A customer, on the other hand, may need to see a fixed price proposal before committing to proceed with a project. Work management staff recognizes the authorization variables and collaborates with others in the facilities organization to acquire the necessary concurrences.

Assigning a work order empowers a work group to proceed as far as the currently available permissions allow. The objective in assigning work is to match the need to the available resources that can best meet that need. An efficient work assignment process allows the service desk person that receives a request to make the assignment directly to an individual. This requires trust, communication, and cooperation between supervisors and work management staff. In cases where direct work assignment is inappropriate, then service desk staff assigns someone, such as a work group supervisor or scheduler, the task of assigning the work. Who assigns the work and to whom it is assigned is largely a function of organization structure.

• A trade-based, or central shop, organization structure has the plumbers reporting to one supervisor, the electricians to another, and the HVAC mechanics to another. The trade staff is then dispatched to jobs in any facility from the central pool of resources.
• A zone-based organization assigns a mixture of trade expertise to care for a specific set of buildings.
• A function-based organization is structured around the type of work. One work group performs the preventive maintenance, while another group responds to service calls.

Many facilities organizations blend these structures as the institution grows and changes. Large institutions can take advantage of a particularly nice hybrid that arranges the most frequently needed trades into work zones; the more exotic trades, such as roofers, elevator mechanics, and fire system technicians, into central shops; and those responsible for renovations into a major projects group. An effective service desk understands the facilities management organization structure, is aware of workloads and customer preferences for the available resources, and assigns the task to a particular work group or individual. The assignment is recorded in the work order information system and clearly communicated to the responsible work group or individual. When work orders involve multiple work groups, then an individual is designated to coordinate the group efforts.

Figure 2. Basic work order information. (Used with permission, University of Virginia, 2009)

Every work order needs essential data describing who, what, when, and where. Work orders also need to capture information that meets the needs of business processes. The processes are as variable as facilities organizations. Here are several data elements worth including in the work order database.

• Work order creation date, time, and created-by stamps: Ideally, the work order system will record this information automatically. At a minimum, the system also needs to capture who last updated the work order and when. A log of what was actually changed, by whom, and when is even better.
• Work type: This is a way to categorize the nature of a work request. It is helpful to think about large categories such as preventive maintenance, repair requests, and minor versus major elective work. Each major work type can then be subcategorized in a way that helps people find and sort work orders. For example, work type can be used to find all the preventive maintenance work orders for a particular building and then sort the work orders into code-required versus routine preventive maintenance.
• Primary trade: Some facility maintenance organizations work out of central shops that are grouped by primary trade. Some work out of maintenance zones. Yet others are a hybrid of central shops and zones. In a central shop organization, one can determine the primary trade by knowing which shop did the work. In a zone maintenance organization, one needs to note the primary trade as a separate work order field. This aids in the assignment of work and in resource planning.
• Permits: Work orders may need legally required permits before work begins. Significant renovations may require a building permit. Replacing a water line may require a digging permit. The service desk staff can often use the work order location and scope to predict the required permits. Where that is possible, it makes sense to record the permits needed in the work order system or in a permit tracking system that is linked to the work order system via the work order number.
• Notifications: While a permit implies a legal obligation, there are plenty of other reviews and approvals that make business sense. An outage notification lets researchers know when the chilled water to their building is going to be turned off. An architectural review board helps provide campus cohesiveness. The sooner the need for a particular notification is recognized and recorded, the better. Some work order systems support these business processes, and in other cases a complementary business application links the notifications to the work order via the work order number.
• Parent-child relationships: Work orders may stand on their own, or be part of a larger effort. When there are parent-child work order relationships, capture this in the work order system so that a whole picture of the larger project is created.
• Priority: It is possible for the combination of several work order fields to establish a work order’s priority. An emergency service call to restore power to a research building is likely to take precedence over replacing a burned-out light bulb in a well-lit room. When the priority is not obvious, the priority field clarifies the situation. Keep the priority system simple. The old-fashioned A, B, and C priorities still work well.
• Expense: The time, material, equipment, and other costs of a work order need to be tracked. The more detail available, the better. This allows for proper billing of the work, for answering questions about who worked on a job and when work was done, and for filling out the Annual APPA Facility Performance Indicators Survey.