Matt Adams is president of The Adams Consulting Group, Atlanta, Georgia. He is co-chair of APPA's Trades Staffing Guideline Task Force and can be reached at matt@adams-grp.com.

The budget of the physical plant has always been at risk for two reasons. First, it was one of the biggest in an institution and second, it was one of the least understood. This is an uncomfortable combination during budget-cutting times. Unfortunately, it is a bad combination during good financial times as well. When asked about the reality of physical plant budgets, responses have been completely different depending on whether a person came from the facilities management side or the business administration side. Several repeating patterns of miscommunication emerged during the last decades that ultimately proved harmful to both parties as well as institutions as a whole. Recently, both facilities management professionals and business administration professionals have reviewed communication strategies and have begun thinking out-of-the-box in order to bridge communication gaps between the two groups. Mastery of this new "shared" language will prove to be a critical skill for successful facility managers and business officers in the future.

In the past, communication was made difficult due to the assumption that engineers and accountants do not speak the same language. During planning and budgeting sessions, this communication handicap was magnified by the inherently complex nature of facility management. In other words, facilities management is not just one, two, or even three functional activities; it is more like eleven or twelve activities. You really can't blame the business officers, since if they don't understand what facilities managers do, what it costs to do it, or why facilities managers don't speak in terms that they can understand, then the business relationship is spoiled.

Facilities managers are some of the most devoted, productive, and yet humble professionals. We all know that the world is not fair, but still, why are physical plant people so often given a hard time? In fact, facilities people really only want and request (though only recently) the basics within the institutional environment. Their most important request is that they not get treated with a different standard in the budgeting process. It makes sense. Give the facilities management budget the same scrutiny that other budgets receive. Don't come back from a NACUBO conference with all of the answers based on some guy that sat next to you from a different institution.

Benchmarks are fast becoming the most frequently abused business practices and for good reason. The level and breadth of service at individual institutions varies greatly and there are many real variables that must be considered. Any knee-jerk comparison of one institution's facilities management department to another's without detailed knowledge of each, is risky as best-often damaging. Even worse is a last minute test to determine if outsourcing is an option. In the past, outsourcing decisions have originated from the business office. As you might expect, this does not provide confidence to the physical plant managers.

The physical plant is just one of many operations under the business office. As such, business administration professionals have considerable responsibility to the institution. The "art" of the business officer profession is one of quick study and interpretation of summary data. It is in this environment of interpreting, summary data that shared communications must occur.

The communication difficulty for the professionals in our industry is the failure to remember that not everyone on campus wants to know all of the details of our work. In addition, the complex nature of the facility management profession encourages us to report data that is inconsistent with the "fast-paced" decision style of senior administrators. Our leaders are looking for simple judgments and decisions. If we can provide that information and make their jobs easier, our jobs will probably get easier too.

Basic Communication "Rosetta Stone" for Facility Managers