COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF THE MANAGEMENT PROCEDURE (STRATEGIES) OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDING
CHAPTER ONE/INTRODUCTION
Background to the study
The development of the construction industry from a traditional crafting industry to a service-based industry requires a more structured and effective process of developing and designing facility management (FM; Enoma, 2005). This trend, as opined by Fahnrich and Meiren (2007) coupled together with the growing number of competitors, increased market saturation, deregulation and multiplication of successful service concepts, making the service markets in the construction industry more dynamic and increasing the pressure on the participating FM providers.
Bernard William Associate (1994) opined that FM is a management process, which includes analytical and systematic approaches used to determine and deliver the agreed levels of service activities that are required to manage, operate, maintain and support a facility in a quality environment at an appropriate cost to meet the business requirements. Hendrickson and Au (1988) opined FM as the discipline of planning, designing, constructing and managing space in every type of structure, from office building to process plant. Becker (1990) presented a picture of FM as a subset of general management. FM, therefore, involves guiding and managing the operations and maintenance of buildings, precincts and community infrastructure on behalf of property or facility owners to achieve a better output at a reduced cost with a higher level of professionalism. According to Enoma (2005), FM is an age-old practice that has existed out of necessity because buildings were first constructed to support human activities which is generally acknowledged as having stemmed from services provided by janitors and caretakers during the 1970s.
Bennett and Iossa (2006), however, observed that decisions as requisite to FM services are often made intuitively, without a thorough analysis of what is really needed and how it is needed, and most decisions are made very late, i.e. when the building’s planning has already been finalised or the building has even been constructed. A fast and early decision-making process with regard to the service support required is, however, crucial to ensure that both the building and the services perfectly fit the life-cycle costs and the users’ comfort. In addition, FM services need to consider an increasing variety of user groups. Bosch and Pearce (2003) concluded that, in the future, the structure of tenants’ households, for example, will vary even more than today, resulting in more diverse service needs for residential buildings. The same is true, in the perspectives of Fahnrich and Meiren (2007), for office buildings, considering the increasing flexibility of people’s work schedules and the blurring of the boundaries between work and private life. The provision of the right services to a customer is, therefore, a crucial, but yet challenging task which requires a structured FM practice which considers (and continuously adapts to) key user needs.
However, dwelling on a study made on the public and private properties in Malaysia by Wong (1999) and on the work of Bennett and Iossa (2006) with the conclusion that FM services tend to thrive more in the private sector than in the public sector, an opinion that can be said to be relevant in the Nigerian context based on the observed cases of public buildings’ negligence and extent of public buildings’ deterioration in the country as opined in a research by Akinsola et al. (2012).
This research work is aimed at appraising MANAGEMENT PROCEDURE (STRATEGIES) OF PUBLIC AND PRIVATE BUILDING
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