Project Management vs Facility Management: Why You Need Both

Facilities management is a broad discipline that encompasses a wide range of services, including project management, for an even wider variety of industry verticals, from manufacturing sites to corporate offices, e-commerce stores, and more.

Should you hire a project manager and a facilities manager, or team up with an FM company that offers both?

In today’s post, Omnia360fs, an integrated facility management company in Cincinnati, Ohio, explains why you should integrate project management as part of your facility management service package.

What’s Facility Maintenance?

Facility management involves the routine, strategic maintenance, and upkeep of a building to ensure it meets various standards: regulatory compliance, safety, energy efficiency, and functionality.

Core Benefits:

Increased productivity
Improved internal processes
Improved labor efficiency
A better-organized plan of operations

What’s Project Management?

According to the Project Management Institute, project management is defined as “the use of specific knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to deliver something of value to people.”

Core Benefits:

Clearer cost analysis
Improved energy performance
Asset tracking and upkeep
Space or workstation optimization

What’s the difference between facilities management and project management?

Although the roles can overlap a bit, they’re fairly distinct. PM focuses on managing a project from beginning to end, whereas FM focuses on continuously managing and providing resources to ensure a building’s upkeep.

Key differences:

PM is temporary, with a clear timeline from start to finish, but FM is ongoing and broader in its scope of activities and objectives.
PM’s main objective is to finish a project on time and under budget; FM is there to support a pre-existing facility.
PMs have more responsibilities; FM has fewer.
PM has various methodologies; FM has inspection, maintenance, and space management.

3 Ways Integrating PM with FM Benefits Your Business

When you let your facility management company manage your projects, you’re hitting two birds with one stone and getting access to new insights and cost-saving potentials that just weren’t possible before.

1. Reallocating Your Budget.

It’s easy to find the best ways to flex your project’s dollars and maximize the effectiveness of your overall budget when a facility management team is overseeing project management duties.

Creating cost-saving initiatives is far easier when a single party understands the ins and outs of your facility’s needs and your project requirements.

2. Find Cost-Saving Insights.

By having your project manager and facility manager serve identical functions, cross-collaboration and new insights are available that would have otherwise fallen through the cracks, due to how siloed these two functions can be.

Where is money falling through the cracks on your project? Is it asset procurement, labor productivity, or some other factor that’s the cause?

Getting a two-pronged, strategic business approach to FM and PM gives you the exact insights you need to identify losses and correct them immediately.

Besides, if you’re running back and forth between your project manager and facility manager, there could be a game of telephone being had: missed information and missed opportunities. Hiring an FM company to oversee project management duties eliminates that risk.

What’s more, is that the understanding, budgeting, and optimization of a project’s workflow and internal processes can open the door to finding new opportunities for your facility to find cost-saving initiatives and improvements within certain areas.

3. Fully Integrated Systems Analysis

With FM and PM under one service provider, you’ll be able to get a bird’s eye view, along with a micro view, of your organization’s performance and how it ties into your project goals.

Leveraging the benefits of FM and PM software allows for accurate tracking and measurement of important metrics for your project’s KPIs. It can also streamline and integrate your overarching site management strategy, as it relates to your current project’s development.

When is Project Management the Right Fit?

Is your company in transition or understaffed? Is it a short-term project (within a few months)? Are you experiencing frequent or semi-frequent bottlenecks, struggling to delegate tasks, or collaborate with various stakeholders and interest groups?

If the answer is yes, a data-driven, collaborative PM/FM solution is perfect for you. If you’re unsure, our free assessment helps to identify whether or not project management services are necessary or if your budget is better spent elsewhere.

Omnia’s Project Management Services: What’s Included?

If your first thought is how great it would be to integrate project management services into your facility maintenance service contract, we’ll give you a good idea of what responsibilities are included as part of our PM services on small to medium-sized projects.

Cost Management.

Your budget matters. That’s why our PM services cover the entire gamut of cost management, from planning, budgeting, estimating, and control to cost applications like earned value analysis (EVA) — a way to measure the work performed on a project.

Project Risk Management.

Understanding risk and managing it is a major component of high-value project management services. Our project managers work to evaluate and categorize risk based on several variables specific to your project.

The types of risk management we account for include:

Cost: The risk measurement of factors that could be a detriment to the budget, including cost estimation errors.
Schedule: The risk of unaccounted-for scheduling conflicts that lead to delay, including scope creep, a common cause of timeline setbacks.
Performance: The risk that certain events could impact performance or labor productivity is something that must be accurately measured and noted.

Forecasting Project Data.

We leverage the latest PM technologies to create predictive models of what — if any — bottlenecks, breakdowns, or potential drawbacks could occur during the course of a project. At Omnia360, we’re able to predict future performance based on streamlined data collection methods. Planning ahead means accessing more cost-saving opportunities.

Accurate Close Out Packages.

At the final stages of a project’s life cycle, our team is able to collect documentation deliverables and assemble them into a package that showcases the trajectory of the project. We believe in transparency, and providing insights into the data behind each decision before, during, and after a project’s completion.

Contact Omnia360 for Project Management Help Today

If you’re looking for help with your next small to medium-sized project, hiring an experienced facility management company is highly recommended.