Supporting Facility Management and Operations through User-Centered Design

Abstract: Today the building sector is focused on improving the energyefficiency in order to meet climate and financial business goals.Technical facility managers work with indoor energy use and oneaspect of their work is to optimize the facility performanceaccording to goals set by the company. Their work role involvestechnical and financial facility management, covering for absentcolleagues by acting as back-up support, as well as managing tenantrelationships. To perform their work, they must be able to accessdisparate digital tools, facility information and automatic controlsystems across various facilities.The purpose of this thesis was twofold. The first was to evaluate thepotential need of a portal that connects various systems and supportsinformation exchange among technical facility managers. The secondwas to disclose what this portal should include and from thatformulate a design solution.A contextual design approach was used to investigate the work domainof the technical facility managers through interviews andobservations. A first insight from the interviews was that technicalfacility managers had to navigate a broad range of tools, accessedfrom separate platforms. Importantly, their automatic control systemswere provided by various suppliers and accessed in disparate ways.Vital information was scattered in different systems, supportingneither daily work nor efficient retrieval of information.Additionally, much information was kept in individual records, whichmade back-up supporting more difficult. The interviews andobservations uncovered 7 user requirements that concerned 1) aholistic view, 2) easy access to automatic control system, 3)customization, 4) information creation 5) information retrieval, 6)statistics and analytics and 7) structure.