| Emory Report | February 23, 1998 |
Volume 50, No. 22 |
Four new directors on board for Facilities ManagementCompleting another step in its reorganization, the Facilities Management Division has now filled four new director positions. Reporting to Bob Hascall, associate vice president for FMD, are Jennifer Fabrick, director of Campus Planning; John Fields, director of Project Management and Construction; Alfred Herzog, director of Plant Operations; and John Mitchell, director of Resource Planning. When he took over as head of FMD in February 1997, Hascall said his first priority was to repair the division's image as an unorganized, noncooperative operation that lacked leadership. To this end, he decided to split the position of director of Campus Planning and Construction into two jobs, since the two major tasks of the post required different capabilities. "Campus planning is a creative, visionary process," Hascall said. "In order to do it effectively and implement the master plan, you need someone who has that skill set: a creative, licensed architect. On the other hand, project management requires a very process-oriented, detailed person. Those two skill sets are really incompatible; I've never met anybody who successfully integrated both those functions." Enter Fabrick and Fields, who both started in January. Fabrick joins Emory after eight years with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, most recently as assistant director for design and construction (see story, p. 3). Fields spent more than 16 years at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where he was director of construction management. Herzog, who has been at Emory since 1987, had been acting director for Plant Operations and Maintenance before being promoted to full director status last July. He will continue to oversee FMD's new zone maintenance program started last fall, along with other day-to-day maintenance and operations responsibilities of the division. Finally, Hascall moved to remedy an internal management system at FMD that "was kind of disjointed, with no cohesiveness." As his new director of Resource Planning, Mitchell "has all the business skills I was looking for. He knows how to run FMD internally as a business," Hascall said. Mitchell comes to Emory after five years as manager of division operations, building maintenance and crafts/programs for the University of Chicago-Argonne National Laboratory. In his reorganization, Hascall eliminated one director's position, that of Engineering Services. Now that the four new directors are in place, it remains for FMD's management team to work itself into a comfortable groove. "Because they're all new, we've got to figure out how we're going to work together to deliver the kind of service the campus expects," Hascall said. "We'll be analyzing our resource needs," he continued. "Can resources be shifted from one department to another? Are new resources required? What will we eliminate? I believe we have adequate resources. I don't believe we're using them as effectively as we can, and it's our job to find out how we can do that." Hascall's zone maintenance concept is one attempt at a remedy. Based on a decentralized model of service delivery, the program breaks down the entire campus into zones, which are serviced by custodial, maintenance and project management teams assigned to each zone. The teams have rounded skill capabilities and are able to take care of a number of maintenance tasks without having to draw on FMD specialists. Hascall said the program allows for more face-to-face dialogue. "We're taking the approach of 'see it, fix it.' We don't wait for someone to send us a work order-we'll just fix it. We're going to reward a more proactive attitude." Other FMD innovations include a move to clean-burning vehicles; the division just purchased 24 electric carts for FMD personnel. The carts, which are half the width of a full-sized truck or car, don't clutter the campus, don't disrupt University traffic and are cheaper to operate and maintain, Hascall said. FMD also is looking into purchasing vehicles powered by compressed natural gas. -Michael Terrazas |