The Service You Get Is the Service You Define
Why an all-green scorecard can sit next to an unusable office, and what to fix before you change vendors
By Rashid Masood Rizvi, Founder, AM Masons Advisory
You’re reviewing the quarterly IFM scorecard. Every line is green.
But you remember that afternoon in July. The chiller failed, the floor became unworkable, and you invoked the business continuity plan and sent 300 people home. Call it half a day of lost work once some of it moved to kitchen tables. At $100 an hour fully loaded, roughly $120,000.
It wasn’t your imagination. It happened. Yet the scorecard doesn’t show even a blip.
So is the vendor hiding it? You check. They’re not. Facilities logged the call at 10am and had a technician on site at 1:45pm, inside its four-hour response time. The fault was in the base building plant, which belongs to the landlord. The property manager was notified at 2pm, and their technician arrived just before 6pm, inside their four-hour window. The fix landed the next morning.
Every KPI was met exactly as written. Nobody broke their contract, and nobody owned the outcome. The scorecard measured whether someone turned up. What you needed to know was whether the space worked.
Change the facilities vendor and this happens again.
Written properly, the building management system alarm reaches facilities and the landlord at the same moment. Both are on site before 2pm, and the floor is cooling again by late afternoon. The contract defines resolution as well as response, and it says who escalates to whom. A digital twin or predictive maintenance might even have caught the fault before it tripped, but only if the contract says who acts on the alert. Same vendor, same landlord, same people. The only difference is how clearly the service was defined.
Part of that definition doesn’t sit in the facilities contract at all. The landlord’s response commitment is set by the lease. Which is why the service you get starts being defined before the lease is signed, not after the first hot day.
The Pattern
Companies change facilities vendors, or move work between in-house and outsourced delivery, because they aren’t getting the service they expected. It’s a reasonable call, and nobody makes it lightly. Transitions are expensive and disruptive.
Yet once the dust settles, things often aren’t much better. A different logo on the uniforms, and a year or two later, similar frustrations.
That’s rarely because the new vendor is no good. It’s because the thing that needed to change came along unchanged.
Why Service Drifts
No vendor starts a contract planning to under-deliver. Most start keen to impress. But over time, every team puts its energy where it sees the client looking: the items raised in monthly reviews, the KPIs on the scorecard, the executive floor. That’s human, and it isn’t unique to vendors.
A contract might describe a hundred services. The client actively watches ten. The other ninety don’t stop, but they get less attention. Preventive maintenance slips a little. Documentation falls behind. Lifecycle planning waits for next year.
A simple rule follows. If something is in the contract and you aren’t measuring it, it’s safe to assume it isn’t happening with the same diligence as the things you are.
That’s how a scorecard stays green while the space becomes harder to use. The scorecard only shows what someone decided to put on it. If what’s on it isn’t what the business feels, the two will drift apart, and the business will believe its own experience over the scorecard every time.
Two Different Problems
When service disappoints, it usually comes down to one of two things.
The first is people. The service is clearly defined, but the team delivering it isn’t right. The wrong skills, weak site leadership, too much turnover. That’s a genuine vendor problem, and it can often be solved with the current vendor through a new account lead, a stronger supervisor or a clear improvement plan. It doesn’t always need a new contract.
The second is definition. The service was never clearly defined: what’s in scope, what isn’t, where one provider’s responsibility ends and the next one’s begins, what good looks like and how it’s measured. Expectations fill whatever space the contract leaves empty, and the client and vendor fill it differently. Both believe they’re right, because the contract doesn’t say.
Only the first is solved by changing vendors. If the problem is definition and you go to market with the same scope, you’ll get the same result under a different name. The new vendor reads the same contract, notices the same things you look at, and drifts the same way.
So before changing anything, find out which problem you actually have. That’s far easier when everything is written down: SOPs, escalation paths, maintenance schedules, KPI definitions. With documentation, you can see whether the process failed or the people did. Without it, every problem looks like the vendor’s fault.
Define What Good Looks Like
Whether you keep your vendor or change it, the fix for a definition problem is the same.
Define the boundaries. Where facilities ends and the landlord, AV, IT and security begin, and who picks up the phone when a fault sits across two of them. The chiller fell through a boundary, not through a vendor.
Measure resolution, not just response. Response time is easy to count. Resolution is what the business feels. A scorecard that can be green while the space is unusable is measuring the vendor’s activity, not the client’s experience. Define both, along with how each is measured, how often it’s reported, in what format and how it’s scored.
Buy speed where it matters. Shorter windows are available, but speed costs money. A two-hour response on every asset means paying for technicians on standby for faults that could wait. Decide which assets actually stop the business, such as cooling, power and access control, and buy the shorter window there.
Agree what happens when it’s missed. How a miss is escalated, what the remedy is, when service credits apply, and when it becomes a contract conversation. Review the measures themselves regularly, because what made sense at signing goes stale. The point isn’t to be punitive. Heavy penalty regimes tend to get priced in and argued over. The point is no surprises, for either side.
If You Do Change
Sometimes change is the right call. When it is, the transition decides whether the definition gets fixed or carried forward, and whether anything critical drops along the way. Handover records, subcontracts, access, emergency plans and validation all need sequencing before day one. That deserves its own piece, and it’s coming next.
Most vendors deliver what they’re asked to deliver, and what they see the client watching. That puts the power with the client, not the vendor.
The service you get is the service you define.
If you’re transitioning vendors or thinking about outsourcing, I’m happy to walk you through the detailed process.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can an IFM scorecard be all green when service felt poor?
Because the scorecard only reports what the contract asks to be measured. If KPIs track response times rather than whether the space was usable, a serious disruption can be fully compliant and never appear on the scorecard.
Why doesn’t changing facilities vendors always improve service?
Because the problem is often the service definition rather than the vendor. If the scope, boundaries and measures stay the same, a new vendor will tend to focus on the same visible items as the last one, and the same gaps will reappear.
What is the difference between a response SLA and a resolution SLA?
A response SLA measures how quickly someone attends a fault. A resolution SLA measures how quickly the service is restored. A provider can meet every response target while the business is still without cooling, power or access, especially when a fault passes between providers and each response window starts only when the previous one ends.
Who is responsible when a fault involves base building plant?
Usually the landlord, under the terms of the lease, while the tenant’s facilities provider handles everything inside the tenant’s space. The service works when both are alerted together and the escalation path between them is written down, rather than one waiting for the other.
Should every asset have a short response time?
No. Faster response costs more, because it means more technicians on standby. Shorter windows are best reserved for assets whose failure stops the business, with standard windows for everything else.
What should a facilities management contract include?
A clear scope with explicit boundaries between providers, documented SOPs, escalation paths including to the landlord, a preventive maintenance schedule, response and resolution measures, KPIs with defined measurement methods, reporting frequency and format, a review cadence for the KPIs themselves, and agreed consequences when performance falls short.
Should facilities KPIs include penalties?
They should include clear, agreed consequences, but not necessarily heavy penalties. Punitive regimes are often priced into the contract and lead to disputes over data. Consequences agreed upfront, covering escalation, remedies and when service credits apply, work better because neither side is surprised.
Is it better to fix the current vendor or change?
It depends on the cause. If the service is well defined and the delivery team is the problem, fixing the current relationship is often faster and cheaper. If the service was never clearly defined, changing vendors without fixing the definition will usually repeat the problem.
Rashid Masood Rizvi is the founder of AM Masons Advisory, an independent corporate real estate and workplace advisory firm. He spent 18 years leading global workplace services at a Fortune 50 company across 180 sites in 20 markets. AM Masons is vendor-agnostic and takes no vendor referral fees or commissions.