Planning doesn’t have to be the enemy of agile

What should real estate and workplace planning look like in an agile organization? 

As your organization's business needs change, can your real estate and workplace planning keep up?  Unassigned seating provides some flexibility.  As team composition changes, just show up to work and sit with the new people on your new team.   

What happens when changes are larger:  there aren't enough seats together for your new team, the new team must consolidate people from several different floors, or your team can't find a conference room for the all of the time you need to be together.  Where do you go now? 

In response to space utilization measures that show most seats are only occupied 40% to 60% of the time, many organizations are moving to unassigned seating and activity-based workplace strategies, which often lead to less total space and less workplace flexibility as needs change.  

If space planners need to provide direction, will you get an answer quickly, or will slow, time-consuming planning processes delay consolidating your new group in one place?

Is this your experience?  If so, Core Planning can provide real-time planning tools to transform real estate and workplace planning in agile organizations.  Contact me at jmather@criticalcore.com or 720.201.4487.

For more thoughts on planning for agile organizations, take a look at Allessandro Di Fiore's Harvard Business Review article "Planning Doesn't Have to Be the Enemy of Agile." 

Real estate and workplace optimization requires more than sensors and IoT

With the flood of new technology solutions to improve space usage and management, “optimize” seems to be the word of the day. As one example, the business press highlighted a recent acquisition target as providing “software that optimizes offices.” In fact, the acquired company provides meeting room scheduling, admittedly very good scheduling, but not what most data scientists would define as true optimization and not what most of us would call “offices.” Similar examples abound in real estate and workplace software descriptions. 

Certainly new workplace software and tools are valuable. Sensors, IoT systems and software, and mobile apps that show workers’ locations provide better data on space usage. Office and meeting room schedulers improve efficiency in finding workspaces and coworkers. These tools can show opportunities and provide “actionable insights.” In simple situations, this information may be enough for optimization. In complex situations, where there are many different ways to take advantage of these opportunities, much more is needed for “optimization.” Overlooking other better solutions can cost millions.  

As real estate users face increasing competition, rising real estate costs and constant pressure to be more responsive, most organizations don’t have the luxury to be satisfied with just improvements. They don’t have the time for slow, inefficient manual processes to make decisions.

Most new real estate technology improves data collection and process efficiency. Core Planning goes further to bring new technology to decision making, moving beyond traditional spreadsheets and manual drag-and-drop solutions with advanced analytics. 

With Core Planning, we’ve found millions in overlooked cost savings and productivity improvements, all in minutes rather than the hours and days needed for traditional approaches. Projects can range from tactical blocking and stacking to multi-facility strategic analyses for campus, regional and national plans that support mergers, acquisitions, growth, and consolidations. Recommendations include which locations to acquire, dispose, renew, cancel, reconfigure and renovate and which business groups to relocate.

For more, please visit my Propmodo article, Real Estate and Workplace Optimization Requires More than Sensors and IoT.