Summer Mobilisation Season and the Case for Preparing Now

The SeasonWhat the summer actually is in facilities management

July and August are mobilisation months. Contracts awarded in the spring start in September, schools and universities empty out, offices run at half occupancy, and manufacturing sites take their shutdown. The work that cannot be done around people gets done now, and the contracts that start in the autumn get built now.

That makes this the busiest documentation period of the year, and almost none of it is created with a sale in mind. Asset registers are compiled because somebody has to know what is being maintained. Risk assessments and method statements are written because access is conditional on them. Data is loaded into the CAFM system because the helpdesk goes live on the first of the month.

The overlap with what a buyer asks for is close to total. The mobilisation file and the diligence file contain the same material under different names, and the difference between an owner who can produce it and an owner who cannot is usually whether anybody filed it.

A mobilisation pack and a diligence pack are the same document with different covers.

The PackThe four things worth keeping from every mobilisation

The asset register and the maintenance schedule behind it. What plant is covered, at what frequency, against which task set, and who signed off the schedule with the client. A buyer reading a PPM contract wants to know whether the scope is defined or interpreted, and the mobilisation is the only moment it was written down in full.

The transfer file. Who came across with the contract, on what terms, with what continuous service, and what information you were given by the outgoing provider. Twelve months later this is difficult to reconstruct. On mobilisation week it is sitting on somebody's desk.

The contract itself, with its schedules. Owners keep the signed front end and lose the appendices, and the appendices hold the service levels, the deduction regime and the pricing mechanism. All three are read in diligence and none of them is in the covering agreement.

The first ninety days of performance data. Whatever the client sees in month one is what they will remember at renewal, and a clean early record is worth having on file when a buyer asks how new contracts bed in.

The HabitTurning it into a habit rather than a project

The realistic version of this is a folder per contract and a rule that the mobilisation lead fills it before the site goes live. It costs an hour per contract at a moment when the material already exists, and it removes the single most common cause of slow FM diligence, which is a buyer waiting on documents that have to be recreated.

With an exit two or three years out, this is close to the highest-value preparation available, because it compounds. Three mobilisation seasons filed properly is a contract book that can be evidenced rather than described, and evidence is what supports an offer when the buyer's adviser starts testing it.

If a sale is further off than that, the same habit still earns its keep at renewal. The client asking why the scope changed is answered from the same folder as the buyer asking what the scope was, and a contract manager's handover becomes a morning's work rather than a fortnight of guesswork. That happens considerably more often than a sale does.