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ABSTRACT
As real estate departments and workplace organisations devote more attention to strategic planning, most of the work has focused on improving performance metrics and developing dashboards to communicate this information dearly and concisely. Yet these steps will take these organisations only part of the way. Once, they have this information, they need to devote more time to developing strategies and plans. This review examines one of these activities - developing high-level occupancy plans. Representatives of the strategy and planning groups at ten leading corporations and the occupancy planning experts at seven service providers and system developers were interviewed for this survey. It was found that most firms continue to complete high-level occupancy plaits with tedious and time-consuming data-collection processes and spreadsheet analyses. These organisations could improve efficiency and the success of their plans in two ways: better analysis approaches and better data collection and organisation. This review summarises the best practices identified in these areas.
Keywords: high-level occupancy planning, strategic planning, workplace resource optimisation
INTRODUCTION
Workplace resource (WPR) organisations are devoting more attention to strategic planning, but most of this work focuses on improving performance metrics and developing dashboards to communicate this information clearly and concisely. These steps will take these organisations only part of the way. Once they have this information, they need to devote more time to how they use it to develop better strategies and plans. This review looks at one aspect of these strategy development activities - developing high-level occupancy plans.
'High-level occupancy planning' is defined as the development of business-group assignments to facilities and/or cities, as well as the specific facility acquisition, disposition and redevelopment strategies needed to support these assignments and maximise the benefit of these assets to the organisation.' These assignments and plans are developed for groups of business units and properties, with the understanding that evolving these 'portfolio plans' can produce greater corporate benefits than merely developing plans for individual properties. This planning can range from short-term analyses providing recommendations to support immediate business changes to long-term analyses planning transitions to new geographic locations, addition of major new facilities, or major capital expenditures.
Representatives of the strategy and planning groups at ten leading corporations and the occupancy planning experts at seven service providers and...