Facilities @ Management

2.13 Forty Years of FM – From a German Perspective

Jochen Abel

I am very pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this book. When Facility Management was born, I was 12 years old and had other things on my mind than my professional career. Today, I hold the professorship of Facility Management Strategies at Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences. I suppose for this reason, and for the reason that Ed Rondeau and I met during an appointment process at the Georgia Institute of Technology, I was approached. I am very happy to comply and report on facility management from my personal perspective – in the form of a professional biography from facility management.

First Contact with FM

I started my professional career at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Hospital in Frankfurt as a freshly qualified engineer, FM was completely unknown to me. I was solidly trained in engineering for healthcare technology. However, starting out as a project engineer was completely different from what I expected. Of course, there were various engineering departments and trade-specific workshops. In addition, though, each engineer had cross-trade responsibility for several buildings. In this function, we were responsible for coordinating all small, medium and large projects. At the same time, we were the central contact person for the users in the relevant building.

This matrix organization was the brainchild of the then head of the Department of Technology and Building Management. The ...