FOCUS INTERVIEW
COLLABORATIVE
THINKING
Taff Farrell the Lead on Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement at VINCI explains why
their new white paper on Collaboration in FM can help practitioners put the ideals into practice
Collaboration ollaboration within FM has long been recognised as an
important way to enhance service delivery and improve
performance. However, recent research carried out by VINCI
Facilities amongst senior practitioners and leaders associated
with facilities management and the built environment
found that only 15 per cent had actually implemented a
comprehensive framework or strategy for collaboration.
The data, which formed part of a wider look at four key
issues: collaboration, wellbeing, climate change and asset
management, concluded that despite incredibly positive
ambitions to achieve improvements in all these areas, the
FM sector has been slow in implementing clear-cut strategic
actions.
To help address these shortfalls, VINCI has published the first
of four White Papers, Collaboration in Facilities Management(i),
looking at how to achieve gold-standard collaboration in facilities
management.
Explaining the thinking behind the White Paper, Ta Farrell the
lead on Operational Excellence and Continuous Improvement for
VINCI explains: “I’d done some work on collaboration, and what I
thought was, ‘we talk about collaboration, but do we really do it?’
And I concluded that’s probably a great question for the foundation
of the white paper.
“We aim to reach the broadest church we can, with our greatest
goal to influence how the built environment operates, its people,
the supply chain and key policy makers, to create value. As an
industry we want to help change the way we do things so that it
works for everyone. We believe there’s room for collaboration in
everything we do, upwards, downwards and sideways.”
Nearly 84 per cent of respondents who were asked whether their
organisations were committed to collaboration said yes, but many
were unable to demonstrate collaborative working in practice. One
of the major sticking points it emerged was a lack of understanding
of what collaboration actually means.
Says Farrell: “The loose sense of many respondents was that ‘we
collaborate because we work together’. We wanted to dig away at
that and come up with not just a definition of what it is, but the
practices that go along with collaboration. It’s o en seen as a so
skill, but actual real collaboration is hard, and it’s got teeth.
“There are frameworks of course, most particularly the ISO
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