In the early 2000s, the auditor general sounded the alarm on the serious lack of maintenance in Quebec’s public facilities. Since that shocking revelation, maintenance and upkeep management has become a major concern for all public organizations—significant sums of money are allocated to building and infrastructure rehabilitation every year.
Over time, many organizations have developed asset maintenance plans. To draw up such a plan, external expertise is required to identify and describe the condition of the properties. This includes conducting a complete inventory of building components and consolidating the results of existing analyses to get a comprehensive overview of asset conditions. The report resulting from this exercise includes a detailed list of needs with cost estimates for corrective work based on the age of building components and the state of disrepair. This real estate health check provides a snapshot of the current situation. It’s a necessary step, but it’s not enough.
When facilities are in very poor condition and funds and capacities are limited—which is the case for many public sector organizations—priorities and work schedules must be established. CIM Conseil has a tried-and-true method to do this. Risk management is used to set priorities for each maintenance task and procedure based on two main criteria:
- The impact of a system shutdown or failure (i.e., the extent of the damage, the first level in the assessment grid being health and safety)
- The likelihood of an incident occurring (mainly related to component age and system redundancy)
After scheduling all the work to be done according to a risk scale, the next step is to group the work into cohesive projects to be classified using the same risk management approach. Tasks are grouped into asset maintenance projects based on the type of work to be done, taking into account legal obligations, operational constraints and implementation strategies.
A comprehensive approach to planning rehabilitation projects
An asset maintenance plan gives you a clear picture of upcoming repairs and upgrades. The next step is to schedule projects over a multi-year horizon, which isn’t easy because you have to factor in the institution’s other real estate needs and priorities. Asset maintenance projects must be coupled with functional renovation projects to produce a property conservation and functionality plan (PCFI). But that’s not all! To ensure consistency across the board, asset maintenance projects must also be part of a broader portfolio of institutional projects, including development projects from the real estate master plan, new technology acquisition plans and energy efficiency and sustainability initiatives.
With its multidisciplinary expertise in real estate planning and property and project management, CIM Conseil helps institutions develop the comprehensive vision they need to ensure that their project office roadmap is supported by a global real estate outlook for the coming years.
This approach considers all organizational needs, issues and priorities and systematically addresses maintenance deficiencies to optimize rehabilitation and modernization activities and investments.
