SECTION 6 - Asset Management

FACILITY PERFORMANCE EVALUATION

A Facility Performance Evaluation (FPE) is based on the simple but revolutionary idea that school buildings of 2010 and 2015 will be better overall than those of today, both for students and for teachers.  Facilities will not only respond to this year's energy crisis or next year's new emergency, but will also be better designed, more comfortable, more sustainable, more accessible, more productive, and more conducive to learning.  They will exemplify the healthy, dynamic, high-performance schools our students and teachers deserve.

This change will come about not by technological innovation, but rather by a thoughtful, long-term commitment to several general, performance-enhancing practices and procedures:

• Define facility performance criteria based on the local school district's priorities
• Evaluate these performance criteria with user feedback, professional investigation, and standardized benchmarks
• Interpret evaluation results as guidelines for future improvement
• Create a centralized databank of current design, construction, and operations practices and their respective evaluations.
• Disseminate evaluation results to a wide audience of decision-makers, and in language and format accessible to all.

More specifically, FPE provides the methods to systematically gather feedback about a wide range of elements from completed projects.  This includes space relationships, energy efficiency, maintenance costs, support for organizational needs, project management strategies, or any other aspect of facility operations considered relevant.  Successful FPE projects then pass along their knowledge to improve future construction.  Ultimately, the goal is to improve the process of delivering buildings as well as the quality of the buildings that are delivered

An effective FPE project will:

• Start small
• Grow quickly
• Limit costs
• Seek participation from a wide range of stakeholders
• Support continuous improvement in buildings and in processes
• Seek ongoing feedback about its own effectiveness, and be receptive to the changes that may result

An FPE project achieves these characteristics by encouraging broad participation, providing a clear structure for communication, disseminating empirical results, and embracing innovation, flexibility, and openness to user feedback. 

In concrete terms, this means applying the performance-enhancing practices in a formal procedure:

1. Establish and clearly define performance criteria:
   • financial criteria – may include soft costs, first costs, life-cycle costs
   • business process criteria –  may include district satisfaction, timeliness, cost-effectiveness, minimization of errors, achievement of stated goals
   • human resources criteria – may include user satisfaction, comfort, health, productivity
   • stakeholder criteria – may include public perception, sustainability
2. Evaluate the process and the outcomes of building delivery using surveys, interviews, records analyses, and other available tools.
3. Interpret results as a tool for future improvement, and define specific goals and means for project decision-makers.
4. Develop a centralized databank for current design, construction, and operations practices and their respective evaluations.
5. Widely disseminate results and conclusions in universally accessibly language and format.
6. Implement conclusions in future business practices and project plans.

The objectives of a successful FPE project are few, but each is critical to increasing the quality of educational facilities in the future.  These objectives may not be met immediately, but it is hoped that the long-term process of performance evaluation will gradually improve our knowledge and our practices, and consequently our schools.

1. Increase stakeholders' awareness of the importance of program planning and quality design in meeting performance criteria.
2. Define building requirements accurately.
3. Establish clear standards first, and then build school facilities to meet them.
4. Develop mechanisms to collect and apply evaluation data to improve future planning and design.
5. Improve recognition for exemplary school facilities projects.

- Richard T. Conrad, FAIA

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