WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
Managing the Downsizing Pressure
Visualizing decisions with validated data is critical to success.
It seems like long ago, but it was only June 2010 when President Obama issued a memorandum to federal agencies mandating space reductions; the goal of which was to save $3 billion annually by 2012 through cost avoidances. Undeniably, progress has been made and continues.
But, the pressure is still on. The House of Representatives Transportation and Infrastructure Committee has the authority to approve or disapprove federal leases. All we need to do is listen to the news and we see where that is trending.
Congress isn’t kidding. The current stream of activity has had the effect of reducing the long-standing allowance of 200 SF per worker down to 157 SF, an approximate reduction of 20%. Include the reductions being mandated to account for teleworkers and the net space per employee gets even smaller.
Examples of success are starting to become visible. For example, GSA’s renovation of their headquarters was reducing the per employee space allowance to just 133 SF per person. We should emphasize “was”, because as explained in the previous article, the GSA renovation has been indefinitely curtailed. This is an action that we consider shortsighted and made necessary only to reduce near term spending irrespective of potential downstream cost increases.
Unfortunately, examples like the GSA headquarters are starting to become increasingly visible. To be clear, we do not think that the staff at GSA acted inappropriately in any way; they were doing the best they could with the information they had available.
VISTAtsi builds a large part of our repertoire around creating valid datasets suited for their intended purpose, using that data through decision support models that have predictive results and then presenting those results and the underlying data through visualization tools that make the consequences of any decision clear. Given the turbulence of today’s federal real property management environment, these capabilities are more important than ever.
Many agencies are stepping forward with quality solutions. Among them is NASA, who has defined their endeavor as: “Space allocation planning is a complex problem involving the allocation of limited resources to meet business goals, reduce operating costs, and promote an effective and productive workplace. The optimization process has many facets and is very complex. So that some benefit could be realized from incremental accomplishments during the development phase, the effort was broken down into modules. These modules include visualization, optimization algorithm, data maintenance, web interface.”
We could not have said it better and we call your attention to the presentation of NASA’s program found on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OZP3pX_PiG0. This visualization uses GIS to effectively present facility stacking and blocking, it gives users the opportunity to visualize opportunities for improvement or to evaluate the effects of decisions. Data visualization comes in many forms, from charts and diagrams to GIS maps and derivative presentations. At VISTAtsi, we recognize that different agencies or organizations need different solutions, economical yet highly configured presentations of key management information about real property.
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