In December 2016, Jeff received a Master’s degree from Georgia Tech in Facility Management. What prompted this move (besides a six-minute bike ride to campus) was the culmination of years of conducting energy audits and building condition assessments. The realization that emerged from that work was that, for many buildings, replacing equipment, or upgrading systems, was not the solution when an underlying lack of professional facility management practices was present. Unfortunately, this is not due to personnel inadequacies but more of an institutional belief that facility management is a “fix when broken” activity seen more as an expense rather than an integral part of maximizing the firm’s mission and profits. Facility management is 98% management.
Jeff’s Thesis for the Master’s degree was a study that compared the energy use of a building to the “quality” of the facility management practices. The energy part of the study used Energy Star Portfolio Manager as the basis for the score. It was the development of the quality metric that formed the largest (and most interest within the industry) part of the work. Based on the principles of modern, professional facility management practice, Jeff created a scale for measuring the quality of how a facility management department is run. As it turns out, there is a direct correlation between how well a building performs and the quality of how that building is managed.
It is our hopes that the facility management quality metric can become a yardstick for assessing how a facility is operated and to identify areas of improvement. Currently, Jeff is refining the quality “scorecard” with plans to launch the product as an integral part of RBGB’s new direction onto existing building management consulting. We believe that a high-performance building must do much more than simply be built to truly reduce negative environmental impacts.
