How can you make FM performance evaluations cost-effective?

1 Define clear goals and criteria

Before you start any FM performance evaluation, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, how you will measure it, and what standards you will use to judge it. This will help you focus your evaluation on the most relevant and important aspects of your FM performance, and avoid wasting resources on irrelevant or redundant data collection and analysis. You should also align your evaluation goals and criteria with your organizational strategy, stakeholder expectations, and industry benchmarks, so that you can demonstrate the value and impact of your FM performance.

2 Choose appropriate methods and tools

Depending on your evaluation goals and criteria, you may need to use different methods and tools to collect and analyze data on your FM performance. For example, you may use surveys, interviews, observations, audits, inspections, or sensors to gather quantitative and qualitative data on various FM performance indicators, such as customer satisfaction, service quality, asset condition, resource consumption, or compliance. You may also use software, dashboards, reports, or scorecards to process, visualize, and communicate your data. You should choose the methods and tools that are most suitable, reliable, and cost-effective for your evaluation purposes, and avoid using too many or too complex methods and tools that may increase your costs, errors, or confusion.

3 Streamline your data collection and analysis

Managing the large amount of data needed for FM performance evaluation can be a major challenge and cost. To streamline this process, it's important to define data requirements and sources accurately, use standardized and consistent data formats and definitions, automate data collection and analysis, integrate data from different sources and systems, validate and verify data quality and accuracy, eliminate or minimize unnecessary or duplicate data, and store and secure data properly. Following these best practices can help to make the process more efficient and cost-effective.

4 Use feedback and improvement loops

Another way to make your FM performance evaluation cost-effective is to use the results of your evaluation to inform and improve your FM performance. This means that you should not treat your evaluation as a one-time or isolated activity, but as a continuous and integrated part of your FM management cycle. You should use the feedback and insights from your evaluation to identify and prioritize your FM performance gaps, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and to plan and implement corrective or preventive actions, innovations, or best practices. You should also monitor and measure the outcomes and impacts of your actions, and use them to refine your evaluation goals, criteria, methods, and tools.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?