Good data critical to a successful outcome

especially in gleaning all the necessary information from multiple sources, that await those wishing to undertake a post-occupancy evaluation.

 For a long time I have believed that we could greatly improve the way we build health facilities by seriously and realistically evaluating what we have done in the past, and feeding what we learn into what we are going to do next. In the past I have never been able to convince any organisation I have ever worked for of the value to that organisation of doing so. In my current role, however, I have finally been given the opportunity to develop a process for capturing the learnings from past projects and improving the way we do business in the future. To this end I have been able to commission a number of POEs to begin the development of this process, and I hope readers will be interested in what has been done, and the learnings to date. For as long as buildings have been built, they have been evaluated. These evaluations have taken many forms – from the master craftsman inspecting the work of his juniors, or perhaps the building owner looking for ways to minimise cost, through to the casual observer admiring the completed product. Post-occupancy evaluation, or POE as we know it, has, however, only emerged as a process fairly recently, perhaps in the 1960s, from the UK and US. We routinely define POE as the systematic evaluation of a building’s performance approximately 12 months after commissioning. Traditionally POEs have focused on the requirements of the facility’s occupants, but in more recent times additional evaluations in the areas of procurement and service delivery outcomes are routinely being included, as some larger organisations begin to focus on “lessons learned” programmes in an attempt to avoid repeating mistakes made in the areas of planning, design, and construction. In reality, we are actually moving away from carrying out traditional post-occupancy evaluations, and focusing more instead on assessing the overall performance of the building, as well as the project that gave birth to it. Two of the most common definitions of what a POE is come from the researchers Wolfgang Preiser and Jacqueline Vischer. They define post-occupancy evaluations as “the process of evaluating buildings in a systematic and rigorous manner after they have been built and occupied for some time” or, alternatively, as “any and all activities that originate out of an interest in learning how a building performs once it is built, including if, and how well, it has met expectations”.

 A ‘diagnostic tool’