More white papers on facilities and software

I’ll be adding a couple of more helpful articles to the White Papers section of the PropertyTrak website. The purpose of these papers is to educate prospective subscribers and to help searchers connect with useful information online. Yes, there’s a risk that people will leave the site and not return, but the greater benefit is that people will be in a better position to evaluate their options and make a better fit in the long run instead of implementing something without weighing all the factors up front.

• “Marketing Facility Services within Your Company” – “This article was excerpted from BOMI Institute’s Fundamentals of Facilities Management textbook required in the Facilities Management Administrator (FMA) designation” (hosted at FM Link, a helpful site where PropertyTrak also advertises).
  I like this article because it shows the real-world context of Facilities Management Systems. The purpose of implementing a work order/ preventive maintenance system is not just to modernize, but more importantly, to demonstrate to others in the organization the value of what Facilities do, and where the costs and pressing needs are.
• “The True Costs of Free and Low-Cost Software” At TechSoup.org for nonprofits, this article is a thorough examination of the many issues involved with implementing any software solution. It makes me think about the costs of using other low-end tools for facilities, like Excel spreadsheets and Post Its, or even systems on AS/400 or other aging platforms.

I know a facility manager who does amazing things with Excel including preventive maintenance, reports, charts, graphs. But I wonder how his replacement will do in taking those tools over from him.

Usability Rules!

I really enjoyed the following post from a blog with the distinctive title, Where Rasta Meets Pasta: “The Importance of Being Earnest about Usability.”

The author, Dara, makes some great observations about software, and I think she’s right on.

• Feature mania: the excitement that drives some customers, end users, and developers to dream of possibilities of functionality with no end in sight. Instead, it’s always critical to return to the questions: what do we really need this product to do? How do people actually use it? What benefits are we providing now, and how do we expand those benefits in a realistic way?
• Feature Rich = Poor Adoption. Just to see this formula in print does my heart good. The goal it seems to me is how to balance simplicity and ease of use with critical benefits for administrative users. I don’t know if this balance is ever reached, but it’s certainly worth striving for.