The new process resulted in reduced down time for the customer and the service staff during moves, and was estimated to yield a 10 to 15 percent cost savings in labor. It was put in place to improve coordination between the information solutions group, which operates as World Bank's IT equivalent under one vice president, and the general services department, which provides and manages the support services, including facilities, under a separate vice president.

The Established Routine

"Work that is done outside of a project, and without the guidance of a project manager, is always difficult and real coordination is 'hit and miss.' When the work required moving people, computers, technology, telephone, and furniture, the flow of the work was anything but coordinated," says John Pivik, Business Manager of Facilities Operations and Maintenance.

Under the old process, a customer's call to the Facilities Help Desk to order a move generated three separate phone calls: one to the facilities services, which are in charge of the boxes, the furniture, and the reconfiguration; one to the ISG help desk, which is accountable for the PC move and IT data/telephone hookup; and a third to arrange for the telephone directory and voicemail changes.

"Once the order was made, each service was accountable for its respective element, but there was no single individual who was accountable for pulling it all together or coordinating the schedule," says Pivik. "The scheduling of the move, phone cut-over, and PC set-up was done independently, but there was no sequencing of the visits. So we ended up disrupting the clients for half or most of a day."

The facilities staff processed more than 600 Help Desk work orders to move about 820 people with 9,800 boxes in FY 2002. The turnaround for each work order was three to five days and did not include any construction. The average cost for the facilities services was approximately $75 per move and the ISG portion of each move averaged $50 to $60 per move. The inefficiencies of the process led to the relatively high technology costs and also had the invisible cost of lost productivity and work time for the clients.

Space Efficiency Project: The Challenge

Ideas for changing the basic move process came from a retreat where discussions focused on the "lessons learned" in a major move project that had just been completed. The Facilities team worked with ISG and directed a project that had been regarded by senior management and clients as "highly effective" and "efficient." From April 1998 through January 2000, the facilities team was charged with the daunting task of creating approximately 1,500 additional workspaces in occupied buildings and completing 8,000 staff moves with minimal disruption. The experience of this "Space Efficiency Project" led to the conclusion that effective communications, carefully planned sequencing of activities, and integrated mapping of processes could overcome the obstacles of inefficiency and complexity.

Based on the recommendation of an outside consultant, the World Bank president endorsed the concept of initiating a Space Efficiency Project (SEP) to reduce the portfolio of the headquarters by 800,000 sf, or 20 percent. The Bank would accomplish this by eliminating all of its leased office space, resulting in an annual savings of $19 million for the remaining lease terms. Since the total cost of the project was $53.3 million, the simple payback for the investment was less than three years.

The facilities team was excited about the challenge, but it soon became clear just how complex the challenge was to be. The project was massive—four million square feet of space in four different buildings with four different kinds of wall systems, four different types of HVAC systems, four different types of furniture systems—and it would require the cooperation of teams from GSD and ISG on a scale that the teams had not seen before.

"It was one of those classic situations where you need to be careful because you might get what you wish for," jokes Pivik. "The task was daunting because there were so many dynamics associated with logistical planning, shifting staff to swing space, and moving people out of one building and into another. Early on, the best decision we made was acknowledging that we needed help and then hiring a project management team from a local commercial developer."

Key Design Elements

The two key elements of the SEP were the universal floor plan and centralized support space. Architects designed standardized floor plans within each building to accommodate a unique concept for modular offices: hard walls, a lot of clerestory glass to let daylight into the center, doors on the offices, and minimal use of systems furniture.

The standard office was reduced from 150 sf to 120 sf; directors and above received an office comprised of two modular rooms. Within the universal floor plan for each building, planners created centralized support areas for small, informal sit-down meetings that the smaller offices could no longer accommodate. The same buildings now contain 1,470 more workspaces and 25 percent more conference and meeting rooms with improved technology.

A hallmark of the SEP was the collaborative environment and effective coordination of trades, from the space planning stage through design, project management, construction, moving, and finally occupancy.

Communication, Implementation

"We worked hard at our communications efforts and placed a high priority on sharing of information. GSD and facilities forged partnerships across all the vice presidential units to make sure that we understood the client needs and communicated project status and updates weekly," says Pivik. "We created a special team to develop a newsletter and maintain our Web page in order to communicate with staff about the project."

The tight schedule, caused by the on-going expiration of leases (and the president's mandate to 'renew no more'), left narrow windows of time for every task of each project. The SEP Master Plan was strictly administered and yet, many of the individual phases of the project ran like any other project namely, there were delays. Few plans work perfectly and the last services in the space are constantly in crisis mode, particularly moving and setting up furniture, and hooking up telecommunications.

End dates for projects could not move or the entire plan would come crashing down. So, out of necessity, the moves were carefully choreographed around construction and cleaning crews and the timing of the telecommunications installation was orchestrated like clockwork. Facilities services soon gained a reputation for being well-coordinated and efficient.

Pivik observes, "We had raised the bar of expectations. Now what do we do for an encore?"

Increased Expectations

Management then started to expect everything the department did to run like clockwork, and that just wasn't happening.

"We looked at our day-to-day processes and I asked my managers to focus on services through our facilities help desk to identify the biggest opportunities for savings," says Pivik.

From discussions with his chief of Moving and Furniture Operations, he discovered some dissatisfaction with the daily move process. While the moving that occurred within the structure of project work was working reasonably well, the individual box moves and small group moves were singled out as an area of disorganization and unnecessarily high costs.

"These were not the big reorganizations, where everybody was focused on who's going where, but on the small moves where people make the request by placing a service ticket," says Pivik.

Through the use of focus groups and feedback from ISG's retreat, Pivik concluded that clients strongly favored a coordinated, automated system for box moves that would require only one phone call or email. A common, standardized form that would serve as a checklist to eliminate gaps in service was also requested.

"In retrospect, this all seems very commonsense but, at the time, this was major," says Pivik. "You had teams from two different vice presidential units with different sets of priorities and different agendas. It all seems very logical, but nobody had ever put it all together before. Clients were satisfied, the moves were accomplished within schedule and budget, but the system worked in spite of the bureaucracy. The processes required exceptional efforts and dedication from our respective staffs."

Successful Strategies

Pivik believes the transformation succeeded because it was generated by a grass roots effort.

"The vice presidents were probably unaware of the communication problems and the customer service issues, but the people on the front lines were very aware," explains Pivik. "They took it upon themselves to start comparing notes across units. They refused to be hindered by the bureaucracy and bypassed the politics. They determined, 'What does the customer really need?' They developed a solution, then they took it up to the manager level.

"We wanted to limit our scope so that we weren't trying to tackle too many things at one time," he continues. "So we limited it to box moves only, of one to five staff, during normal hours with no adjustments and no construction. And we established a service expectation of having a requested move completed within 48 hours of the business request."

The success of this project required communication not only between two different silos, but also among three different databases: work orders were managed by FacilitiesCenter™, a Peregrine software package; the ISG help desk used Remedy®, another Peregrine product; and an Oracle database that World Bank had customized to import data to construct the telephone directory. The task was complicated by the fact that Peregrine was sold in the summer of 2002, and different buyers purchased Remedy® and FacilitiesCenter™.

The solution created by in-house programmers was a Web-based front end that populates all three databases. The facilities help desk schedules the work so it is timed tightly and sequentially, to avoid return trips to the office and long wait times. If a work order results in a space conflict, it is transferred to the space planning office. At first, between 60 and 70 percent of the orders were being placed online. Now, 100 percent of the requests are electronic.

The implementation team ran short-term pilots within the GSD and ISG vice presidential units to flush out any bugs without the risk of upsetting external clients. Despite some bugs—such as incorrect data entry fields on the Web forms and scenarios they hadn't foreseen—they were able to demonstrate that it could improve customer satisfaction, and increase efficiency, thereby reducing costs.

Looking Ahead

The system and process continue to work well and are being upgraded continually.

"The next step," says Pivik "is to expand the system to handle box moves of 15 to 20 people."

They also are looking into exporting the system to their overseas offices. And finally, facilities team has some ideas for future adaptation of the system including:
• Integration of business systems and SAP to track functions
• Automated dashboard for real-time tracking of ticket status
• Branch to other facilities services
• Extend services to other areas of the department

By Lisa Wesel