NEW YORK, NY--A two-day, comprehensive course on Strategic Facilities Planning, taught by Robert Klein, a principal at Swanke Hayden Connell Architects, will be offered by the Harvard University Graduate School of Design on July 31st and August 1st.

As companies and institutions increasingly face the challenge of aligning real estate and facility assets with their business goals, strategic facilities planning (SFP) has grown as an area of expertise and as a discipline that provides sophisticated tools to support complex decisions. Simply put, a strategic facilities plan is a means of visualizing the future, which allows an organization to test a future condition that does not yet exist, assessing long-term facility and real estate requirements and communicating strategic opportunities to senior management.

Intended for architects, urban planners, urban designers, real estate managers, real estate consultants, and facility managers, the Harvard seminar offers insights into SFP. The two-day program, presented through a combination of lectures, case histories, group projects, discussions, and slides, will cover:
· The meaning of strategic facilities planning.
· A process for providing strategic facilities planning to specific real-world situations.
· When to use SFP--through a series of actual SFP case studies.
· How to prepare a request for proposals (RFP) to ensure the right answers are delivered for the right questions.

Participants will discover how those empowered to make facility decisions can create a business plan-like justification for real estate decisions by modeling future space requirements or adjacencies based on both internal and external business drivers. The process is grounded in consensus building, quantitative and qualitative evaluation and ranking of options, and language that relates to both business-oriented and facility-oriented professionals.

A licensed architect, Robert Klein is a workplace strategy expert with over 30 years of experience in both the United States and United Kingdom. At SHCA his practice is dedicated to 'pre-design' services in space analysis, strategic master planning, programming, building appraisal and workplace performance research. In the past five years he has completed major strategic facilities planning projects for Fortune 500 companies, public agencies, and prominent universities.

For further information please contact the Harvard University Office of Executive Education, (617) 384-7214 or execed@gsd.harvard.edu. Swanke Hayden Connell Architects (http://www.shca.com/) is the continuation of an architectural practice founded in 1906. Staffed with more than 300 professionals located in eight offices worldwide, the firm provides services in five core areas of practice: architecture, interior design, master planning, strategic facilities planning, and historic preservation, working with a variety of corporate and institutional clients.