My conversations with maintenance and engineering managers over the years have covered the entire range of management and technology topics, most of them longstanding and predictable: Staffing. Deferred maintenance. Outsourcing. Technology. Doing more with less.
The topics have been predictable because attitudes toward maintenance and operations in many organizations haven’t changed much for decades. Organizations back-burnered maintenance when it came to attention and funding. Managers and directors had to scramble to get even the slightest recognition from the C-suite for the accomplishments of their front-line technicians. Managers often learned about organizational priorities and decisions from emails, not because they were part of the conversation.
To get a sense of the issues facing managers today, I asked members of the magazine’s editorial advisory board — listed to the right — about their challenges and priorities, and I learned something very important:
Things have changed.
While the usual topics came up — Can somebody please solve the staffing problem? — a host of new and emerging ideas and issues now dominate their discussions. Among them:
Portfolio rightsizing. Resilience. Electrification. Data-driven decisions. Digital documentation systems. Financial literacy. Cross-departmental collaboration. Enterprise-level optimization.
These are not the challenges of previous generations. They are the cutting-edge issues of a new generation of broader-minded, well-informed and networked managers and directors who understand the critical role their facilities play in their organizations’ core missions. They are the issues of a new generation of players in facilities.
In short, maintenance and engineering managers have finally taken a seat at the table, and they have plenty to say.
Dan Hounsell is senior editor for the facilities market. He has more than 30 years of experience writing about facilities maintenance, engineering and management.
