Infinite Mindset in Property life

What is an infinite mindset in starting the property lifecycle and why do you need it?

It all starts with the investor who defines the strategy of the property. If the strategy is „build and sell or lease“, mindset is definitely not infinite. In that case, all the project preparation phase tasks would be oriented towards achieving a unique goal of saving the money or achieving a more simple way to finishing the building or restoring the existing facility. Design brief would be shallow, project requirements limited, and technology simplified. Design development process would cover simple layers of achieving basic requirements, or it could even suffer some serious limitations.

Construction phase is conducted according to prepared documentation, but during the process some of the decisions on material or technology optimisation would be realised only based on the financial influence. The commissioning phase would be abbreviated with a loss of details in administration and finishing up on minor design deviations. At the end the preventive maintenance, warranty periods or energy efficiency would not have any large significance in planning of the investment. It would be someone else‘s problem.

When we analyse the targets that need to be achieved, we can define which project participants have an infinite mindset regarding the building life. The Owner (if he has long term plans), the Users (only while occupying the facility) and finally and most certain – the Facility Manager (usually included in the commissioning phase). All of the other participants have the prevailing limited mindset to execute the project and leave. The Designer is interested in completing documentation or make additional impact in his profession or area of interest. The project manager thinks of achieving budgets and deadlines with possible suffering of the scope of the project. The construction companies are interested in deliverables which result in fee collection. Construction supervision consultants require not much more than compliance with design and legislative. If the owner is not interested in property life, and users are the ones to receive what is served, the one who has the role of resolving any issues that occur in long term property life from the start is the Facility Manager. His thoughts are on what happens next day, next week, next year and how to prevent or predict it.

What can you achieve if you have an infinite mindset in property investment from the start:

• Better Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for assets
• Backup and redundancy issues taken under more consideration
• Maintenance operations simplified or more efficient
• Equipment compatibility achieved for controlled sourcing
• Service contracts carefully planned and realised