ESTABLISHING THE CONDITIONS FOR THE IMPLEMENTATION OF THE BRITISH STANDARD FOR COLLABORATIVE BUSINESS RELATIONSHIPS (BS 11000) WITHIN THE FACILITIES MANAGEMENT INDUSTRY
Facilities Management (FM) is focused on people, relationships and partnerships. Up until recently however, there has not been a formal framework that addresses the importance of collaborative business partnerships. In October 2010, British Standards developed the first framework for collaborative business partnerships (BS11000). Although this is novel and crucial for sustaining long-term business collaboration, BS11000 presents a number of challenges for the FM industry. This study introduces a fresh research design by establishing the conditions needed through exploration of the viability, effectiveness and potential of the newly introduced British Standard for Collaborative Business Partnership (BS11000) into the UK FM industry. This research adopts a sequential explanatory mixed methods strategy combining quantitative data through survey research in the first stage of the study and followed by qualitative data collected through in-depth semi-structured interviews and analysed using computer aided qualitative data analysis software. The findings of the research establish six critical success factors needed to effectively implement the British Standard for Collaborative Business Partnerships (BS11000) within the facilities management (FM) industry by evaluating perceptions of prominent FM stakeholders across the UK FM industry. The six conditions identified are (1) Understand the business motive and the position of FM in an organisation (2) Streamlining contractual issues prior venturing into collaboration (3)Identify common personality and culture to foster alliances (4) Assessment of organisational structure (5) Define organisation priorities and (6) Promote BS 11000 to increase awareness level and benefits of adopting the framework.
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