Practice makes perfect at Royal Academy
of Music with BusinessSolve scheduling solution
31 January 2007, London, UK – Booking music practice rooms
at London’s prestigious Royal
Academy of Music will now be vastly more efficient for the students
following the deployment of a
sophisticated scheduling solution developed by BusinessSolve. Practice
Room Manager - which goes
live today - is based on BusinessSolve’s recently announced
Hotdesk Manager, and enables students to book music practice rooms
in advance, via a Web Browser or Touch Screen panel.
The Academy’s management board
decided to overhaul its previous booking procedures after
Student Union representatives outlined that paper-based bookings
were outdated, environmentally
incorrect and unable to keep pace with the increasing demands placed
upon it by the Academy’s 700
students.
With the recent move to a Windows-based environment, the Academy
was in a position to consider
a more effective method for pre-booking practice rooms.
Please note - we are not talking here
of the few companies, usually consultancies with an almost totally ‘floating’ workforce,
using hot desking or hotelling as a deliberate cultural approach
in place of the ‘conventional’ office with assigned desks.
Hot desking means simply providing spare desks
which are used on an ad hoc, first come, first served basis without
any management.
Hotelling means providing hot desking on a managed
basis with the opportunity to book a deskspace, conference room
and support services in advance via ‘phone or e-mail / Internet.
(For completeness we should also mention motelling and guesting.
Motelling is the same as hotelling but does not involve pre-booking – workers
simply turn up and arrange their facilities ‘on the spot’.
Guesting is the practice of accommodating other company’s
employees. This is quite common in project based businesses such
as construction and engineering. In our view, ‘guest’ workers
should have their own lockable rooms and facilities kept as isolated
from the host business as practicable. Even the best run businesses
have plenty of matters they don’t want visitors / guests
to overhear or witness, particularly if they are customers as well).
We favour the hotelling, ie, managed / pre-booked approach. Simply
providing desks without managing them means that squatting will
almost certainly become widespread or the desks will become dumping
grounds which spoils the whole idea of having them in the first
place. FMs need the advance information that will enable them to
provide services. Finally, pre-booking installs an element of discipline
into the process.
A number of common sense questions present themselves:
How many desks should be provided?
Should they be scattered between departments or aggregated
in one area?
Should storage be provided for users?
What about the impact on car parking?
What facilities should be provided at the workstation?
What should each hotel desk consist of?
How many desks should be provided?
Each company is different but an entirely unscientific survey
taken of Facilities Managers of our acquaintance came up with the
ratio of 1 desk for every 4 potential users. FMs need to monitor
use to see what the proper ratio should be.
The only published research we have found is from FM provider Johnson
Controls who have worked out their own hotelling needs to be as follows:
1 desk for every 2 mobile workers who use the office once or
twice per week
1 desk for every 5 highly mobile workers who use the office
for occasional ‘touchdown’ purposes.
Clearly, it is going to be a matter of trial and error to start
with. There is likely to be a heavy demand for hotel desks on Friday
afternoons or Monday mornings and allowance needs to be made for
this.
Should desks be scattered between departments or aggregated
in one area?
We think that spreading them around the building effectively transfers
ownership to the departments in which they are housed. This is undesirable
and likely to lead to them becoming dumping grounds or being used
for other purposes. The advantage of distributing hotel desks around
a building is that visitors can sit nearer to the immediate colleagues
they may need to consult. However, our feeling is that hotel desks
should be aggregated in one area. They are a corporate resource and
should be managed as such. A dedicated area can be monitored more
easily by the FM with the Receptionist or a Concierge keeping an
eye on day to day housekeeping.
Should storage be provided for users?
Some sort of mail drop facility needs to be provided for visitors
for whom the office is their ‘home’ office (unless
there is a procedure for regularly sending it on to their home
addresses). We favour having a dedicated mobile drawer pedestal
for each possible visitor if they want one because it gives a sense
of ‘defensible space’ or ownership, which is always
a good thing.
What about the impact on car parking?
In our experience, the days of reserved car parking spaces,
with the possible exception of the Chairman, have long gone. We don’t
think that parking management needs to be considered except for the
FM to ensure that there are sufficient spaces available for visitors
to hotel desks in addition to those used by the regular workforce.
A building in an out-of-town business park is likely to require more
additional parking spaces than one in a city centre.
What facilities should be provided at the workstation?
Again, this will vary from company to company. Possibly a small percentage
need a desktop PC. connected to the network. Others might have
a docking station and a desktop screen also linked to the network.
The vast majority need no PC or docking station because many people
are just as happy to work off their laptop. Therefore, wi-fi and
a network connection lead needs to be provided for each hotel desk.
A minimum of four easily accessible 13 amp sockets need to be provided
- one for a laptop, one for a mobile ‘phone charger, one
for a PDA and one for something else, a portable printer or an
IPod perhaps.
What should each hotel desk consist of?
In general, we favour a reasonable sized, rectangular desk
of 1600mm x 800mm. We see no need for anything larger or more complicated,
a ‘wave’ or ‘radial’ desk for example. They
just take up space unnecessarily.
Companies in the construction and engineering industries will need
spreader space for drawings.
The desk should be clearly labelled a hotel desk which must be booked
through the Concierge / Reception. By ‘clearly labelled’,
we mean a proper printed sign, not an A4 notice knocked off on a
laser printer and pinned to the desk screen.
Some degree of screening from other users and an occasional shelf
at eye level are desirable. Mobile pedestals should be nominal and
not offer a vast amount of storage. Such facilities tend to become
rubbish depositories and should only be provided on request.
A good quality, adjustable chair - with instructions on how to adjust
it - also needs to be provided.
Do height adjustable desks need to be provided? We think this is
going a bit far but no doubt the arbiters of the Display Screen Regulations
in the business will have their own view.
How should these desks be managed?
Some companies have complicated sign-in procedures with
pin numbers which double up as their internal telephone number and
printer access number but whether this degree of complexity is needed
is, in our opinion, debatable.
That said, we favour a formal management system for these reasons:
The Facilities Manager needs to know what visitors are in the
building
The Facilities Manager needs to be able to monitor hotel desk
useage
The Receptionist / Concierge needs to be able to give the visitor
a floorplan showing where the assigned hotel desk is located.
It may be worth extending the role of the Receptionist / Concierge
to providing small services for visitors, eg, dealing with dry cleaning,
organising car collection, calling for a taxi etc.
Recommended management system
We’ve looked at a number of web-based management systems.
On balance, we think the system offered by Business Solve is as good
and as cost-effective as any. It accepts floor layouts in Autocad
and provides an economical and cost effective product for as few
as 50 ‘elements’, an element being a desk or a conference
room or a car parking space, from around £3,500 + VAT including
installation and staff training.
The Receptionist / Concierge allocates the desk, prints out a visitor’s
pass and an A4 floor layout showing where the desk is. Conference
rooms and hospitality can be booked at the same time.
This product seems to do everything most companies need to do without
being overly complicated orparticularly expensive. Details can be
obtained at the following link:
Workspace
Manager
The author is Richard Buckley of Buckley Associates
www.buckleyassociates.co.uk
Author: Richard Buckley | 2006-11-06 |
