Organization

• Introduction
• Effective Organizational Design
• Organizational Capabilities, Activities, and Core Competencies
• A New Organizational View: What's Ahead for the Twenty-First-Century Facilities Management Organization?
• Notes and References

Introduction

The design of the facilities management organization is ultimately the responsibility of the chief facilities officer. While others may be called on to participate in designing, to react to designs, to provide suggestions, to do analysis, or to help in planning implementation, it is ultimately the leader’s job to actively shape the organization. To ignore design is to throw away a potentially powerful tool for building effective organizations.

Challenges facing organizations today are different from those of the past, and thus the concept and practices of organizational theory and design are evolving. The APPA Institutional members and research into hundreds of facilities management organizations of all sizes provide a knowledge base to make many facilities management organizational designs more effective. Organizations are not static; today, many facilities management organizations are facing a need to transform themselves into dramatically different organizations because of new challenges in the campus environment and the external environment. The higher education facilities management profession is changing more rapidly than ever before, and facilities managers are responsible for positioning their organizations to adapt to new needs. 

Some specific challenges today that facilities organizations are facing are imperatives to understand customer needs, customer goals and what customers value, expectations to be more effective by responding to needs more rapidly and more flexibly, demands to continually manage costs and become more efficient, obligations to be competitive, and continued pressure to do more with less. These challenges represent a number of “new normal “situations that are forcing the facilities manager to confront a new reality of organizational strategy, organizational purpose, and organizational design. Adding to the complexity of the job are continuing expectations that facilities management organizations will make progress on the old familiar challenge of leading the institution in its asset stewardship responsibility when many institutions are facing daunting financial challenges in managing the cost of a higher education degree.

Changes in campus workforce and workplace expectations also place demands on facilities leaders to stay current with information technology, the digital workplace, and new demands to meet the challenges of an increasingly diversified and complex workforce.  In addition, workforce attributes that are paramount to realizing a successful facilities organization today include exemplary talent management, continual development of essential workforce capabilities and organizational capacity, leadership development and succession, and constant nurturing of personal proficiency, including technical skills, leadership skills, and accomplished competencies in ethics and professional standards. Managers must be prepared to design and redesign their organizational structures as these changing service requirements and service environment conditions unfold.

In this chapter, we will address the most prevalent communities of practice in facilities management organizational structural forms discovered from digging deep and studying existing college and university facilities management organizations. Many facilities management organizations currently follow a hybrid organizational structure, combining two or more of the most common types of structural forms. Facilities management hierarchy, functions, specialization, divisions of labor, and areas of organizational core competence are presented. The APPA Facilities Management Core Competency Framework is described, and how to use this framework to help design an effective organizational structure is explained. 

In the concluding section of this chapter, "A New Organizational View," we explore the need to rethink the organization to help us recognize how facilities management work has changed and consequently how to use organizational structure to find new ways of delivering services. 

A good organizational structure is critically important if the facilities organization is going to adapt to these realities and other changes that will inevitably continue to alter the campus facilities management landscape. Thus, some understanding of organizational theory and organizational design is required for successful leadership.