Developing an effective renovation plan: the influence of data collection tools

Abstract

Purpose All built facility begins to show signs of deterioration immediately after the facility is completed and put to use, thus necessitating routine maintenance. Increase in defects due to age, usage, and other factors, requires extensive maintenance activities known as renovation. The data used for a typical renovation plan can be collected using the condition assessment (CA) tool which depends on physical inspection of the defects or through a facility condition index which hinges on harnessing and analyzing the information in the operational history of the facility. The purpose of this paper is to examine the quality of a typical renovation plan using both tools. Design/methodology/approach The single case study of qualitative research was adopted. The data were collected through the principle of semi-structured questionnaire complemented with interviews and document analysis. The documents include periodic operational reports and a CA report used for planned renovation exercise of the Facilities Management (FM) Unit in a higher education institution in South Africa. Findings The findings revealed that although the FM Unit produces periodic reports, but there was no evidence of detailed analysis of the reports. Therefore, the programmed renovation exercises are based purely on the information from a CA. Research limitations/implications This research is a single site case study of qualitative research; the data collected are limited and not sufficient for generalization of the results. Furthermore, the lack of record of the analysis of the operational history in the periodic reports negatively affected the computation of facilities condition index (FCI). Thus it was not possible to demonstrate the strength of FCI over CA from empirical information. Originality/value The quality of a typical renovation plan is influenced by the tool used for data collection. Although the CA tool is commonly used, experience shows that the renovation exercise developed from such records is prone to many execution setbacks, such as frequent scope changes and the associated cost and time overruns. These setbacks can be minimized if the FCI is used as the tool for data collection.