The Only Template Project You Need to Return to Office Work

Ben Hadick imageBen Hadick  •  

Office return template (1)

Template projects have proven to be extremely useful for Fieldwire users juggling multiple projects, especially those coming out of lockdown and back to office work.

If you think you'll be creating similar projects frequently as you return to work, we suggest creating a template project that’s set up with the correct categories, people, checklists, folders, and settings to save you time.

For the purpose of this blog post, we’ll show you how to create an “Office Building Collaboration” project template using Fieldwire. This will be particularly useful for owners and operators who need to ensure their buildings are safe as people return to work.

Simply follow these 7 steps:

1. Create a Fieldwire project called “Office Building Collaboration.”

2. Invite the building maintenance, building owners, and office personnel to the Fieldwire project. Why?

  • To foster a transparent environment where everyone has visibility to COVID revised floor plans and future office modifications or improvements
  • To have one place to easily plan, manage, and prove building recommissioning and maintenance work
  • To empower office workers with information; ensuring they have access to the latest COVID social distancing and sanitization protocols
  • To create an inclusive environment where all voices are equally heard
  • To make everyone feel a part of the new, collaborative return to work ecosystem

3. Create standard categories to organize your virtual collaboration activities, for example:

  • Current Facility Requirements (CFRs)
  • Building Owners
  • Building Recommissioning
  • Building Engineers
  • Building Management
  • Building Inspections
  • Janitorial Maintenance
  • Building Operations and Maintenance
  • Information Technology
  • Commissioning
  • COVID Safety
  • COVID Task Force
  • Workplace Equity and Inclusion
  • Team Happy Hour
  • All-Hands Meeting
  • HVAC
  • Plumbing
  • Painting
  • Millwork
  • Architecture
  • Electrical
  • Mechanical
  • Security
  • BAS and Building Controls
  • Fire Suppression
  • Elevators

4. Create standard checklists to add structure to your collaboration and keep projects on track. Best practice is to develop your commissioning strategy checklists based on ASHRAE's strategic guide to commissioning. Work with your building operations and maintenance staff to develop great maintenance and operations checklists.

Here are some example checklists for your “Office Building Collaboration:”

  • Steps to update your Current Facility Requirements
  • Building Commissioning guidelines and procedures
  • Operations and maintenance procedures (example: HVAC inspections, testing, etc)
  • COVID safety guidelines
  • Onboarding items for new employees

5. Upload the office building construction drawings and office layout plans, and come up with a consistent folder structure and drawing naming convention, such as:

  • 01_Indices
  • 02_Architectural
  • 03_Structural
  • 04_Mechanical
  • 05_Electrical
  • 06_Floor Plan

By empowering your building owners, maintenance, engineering, and office workers with access to the floor plans and drawings, you create a powerful ecosystem of office facility collaboration.

This provides a framework to attach tasks, photos, or any document directly to a specific location on the plan (i.e., conference room, cubicle, or IT room). For example, if a worker sees something not following COVID principles, they can drop a pin on the location, snap a photo, and trigger for the issue to be resolved. Watch this tutorial on how to create tasks!

6. Upload important facility documents to the files tab, organized based on folder type. Examples of file folder types include:

  • Current Facility Requirements (CFRs)
  • COVID Safety Agreements
  • New Employee COVID Safety Protocols
  • Facility Specifications
  • Facility Submittals
  • Operations and Maintenance Manuals
  • Material Safety Data Sheets
  • Building Information (Occupants, security, etc)
  • Building Sustainability and Energy
  • LEED Certifications Documentation
  • Site Instructions
  • Requests for Information
  • Change Orders
  • Reports

7. Build out custom form templates to track compliance, store information, and collect signatures. For example:

Now that you have your template project set up and standardized on Fieldwire, you have a strong foundation to coordinate the four things that need to happen before your team can fully return to the office. For more information, check out this blog post.

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