Just Because You're Necessary Doesn't Mean You're Important
How Post-Secondary Institutions Misposition Facilities Management, the Consequences That Follow, and How to Correct the System
by Grant Sommerfeld

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Every institution relies on Facilities Management. Few understand it. Yet when FM sneezes, the entire campus catches a cold. Facilities Management is most visible when something goes wrong. When it performs well, it fades into the background. When it struggles, it dominates attention. This imbalance skews how the function is perceived, judged, and governed, reinforcing the belief that FM is reactive rather than systemic. Just Because You’re Necessary Doesn’t Mean You’re Important reframes Facilities Management as the campus’s immune system: essential, protective, and taken for granted until failure makes it impossible to ignore. This book is written for institutional leaders who want to understand and fix the systems that underpin Facilities Management’s performance and harness the functions’ full potential to improve institutional outcomes. Drawing on decades of senior leadership and consulting experience, Grant Sommerfeld exposes the contradiction at the heart of Facilities Management’s identity: relying on an essential, high-profile, and costly function while organizing and governing it as if it were not important. He shows how this error fuels instability, escalation, and mistrust and how fixing the underlying system restores control and reliability, enabling Facilities Management to control costs, improve service delivery, enhance stakeholder confidence, and support institutional priorities with greater consistency and impact. Through clear explanations and practical frameworks, this book helps leaders: • see Facilities Management as an institutional system, not a technical service • diagnose the upstream conditions that shape downstream performance • understand FM organizational maturity and why it predicts reliability • redesign roles, workflows, and decision rights to restore control At a time of financial pressure, rising expectations, and increasing operational risk, post-secondary leaders can no longer afford to overlook one of the most underused and consequential strategic resources on campus.

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"A well-researched, convincingly argued case for rethinking conventional attitudes toward a key department." —Kirkus Reviews

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Grant Sommerfeld is a recognized authority in post-secondary Facilities Management. With more than 20 years of FM leadership and consulting experience, he works with universities, polytechnics, and colleges to redesign operating models that shape institutional reliability, service quality, and risk exposure. His work helps institutions restore control, reduce escalation, and enable Facilities Management to support institutional priorities with greater consistency and credibility. He holds an MBA and three professional designations in Facilities Management (CFM, CEFP, FRICS) and one in Management Consulting (CMC). He is a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors and the current President of the IFMA FM Consultants Council. Grant is known for bringing strategic clarity to one of higher education's most critical and least understood functions.

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Grant Sommerfeld

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