At the most fundamental level, the purpose of a building is to provide shelter for activities that could not be carried out as effectively, or carried out at all, in the natural environment. Buildings are designed and constructed to (1) protect people and equipment from elements such as wind, rain, snow, and heat; (2) provide interior space whose configuration, furnishings, and environment (temperature, humidity, noise, light, air quality, materials) are suited to the activities that take place within; and (3) provide the infrastructure— water, electricity, waste disposal systems, fire suppression—necessary to carry out activities in a safe environment.

Today, people and organizations have even higher expectations for buildings. Owners expect that their investments will result in buildings that support their business lines or missions by enhancing worker productivity, profits, and image; that are sustainable, accessible, adaptable to new uses, energy efficient, and cost-effective to build and to maintain; and that meet the needs of their clients. Users expect that buildings will be functional, comfortable, and safe and will not impair their health. A building’s performance is its capacity to meet any or all of these expectations.

Post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is a process for evaluating a building’s performance once it is occupied. It is based on the idea that finding out about users’ needs by systematically assessing human response to buildings and other designed spaces is a legitimate aim of building research. Early efforts at POE focused on housing needs of disadvantaged groups to improve environmental quality in government-subsidized housing. The process was later applied to other government facilities such as military housing, hospitals, prisons, and courthouses. POE began to be used for office buildings and other commercial real estate in the mid-1980s and continues to be used for a variety of facility types today.

As POE has been applied to a larger range of building types and as expectations for buildings have evolved, POE has come to mean any and all activities that originate out of an interest in learning how a building performs once it is built, including whether and how well it has met expectations and how satisfied building users are with the environment that has been created. Although POEs are still focused on determining user comfort and satisfaction, organizations are attempting to find ways to use the information gathered to support more informed decision-making about space and building investments during the programming, design, construction, and operation phases of a facility’s life cycle. To do this, organizations need to establish design criteria, databases or other methods for compiling lessons from POEs and for disseminating those lessons throughout the organization, from senior executives to midlevel managers, project managers, consultants, and clients.

The federal government is the United States’ largest owner of facilities, with approximately 500,000 facilities worldwide. Federal agencies that own, use, or provide facilities have a significant interest in optimizing their performance. The General Services Administration, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Naval Facilities Engineering Command, U.S. Postal Service, State Department, and Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts have been leaders in the development and practice of POEs. They and other federal agencies are trying to find ways to share information about effective

processes for conducting POEs, to capture and disseminate lessons learned, and to increase the value that POEs add to the facility acquisition process.

The Federal Facilities Council (FFC) is a cooperative association of 21 federal agencies with interests and responsibilities for large inventories of buildings. The FFC is a continuing activity of the Board on Infrastructure and the Constructed Environment of the National Research Council (NRC), the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering. In 1986, the FFC requested that the NRC appoint a committee to examine the field and propose ways by which the POE process could be improved to better serve public and private sector organizations. The resulting report, Post-Occupancy Evaluation Practices in the Building Process: Opportunities for Improvement, proposed a broader view of POEs—from being simply the end phase of a building project to being an integral part of the entire building process. The authoring committee recommended a series of actions related to policy, procedures, and innovative technologies and techniques to achieve that broader view.

In 2000, the FFC funded a second study to look at the state of the practice of POEs and lessons-learned programs among federal agencies and in private, public, and academic organizations both here and abroad. The sponsor agencies specifically wanted to determine whether and how information gathered during POE processes could be used to help inform decisions made in the programming, budgeting, design, construction, and operation phases of facility acquisition in a useful and timely way. To complete this study, the FFC commissioned a set of papers by recognized experts in this field, conducted a survey of selected federal agencies with POE programs, and held a forum at the National Academy of Sciences on March 13, 2001, to address these issues. This report is the result of those efforts.

Within the context of a rapidly changing building industry and the introduction of new specialty fields and technologies into the building process and new design objectives for buildings that are sustainable, healthy, and productivity enhancing, and with ever-greater demands on limited resources, POE constitutes a potentially vital contribution in the effort to maintain quality assurance. Within the federal government, the downsizing of in-house facilities engineering organizations, the increased outsourcing of design and construction functions, and the loss of in-house technical expertise, all underscore the need for a strong capability to capture and disseminate lessons learned as part of a dynamic project delivery process. We hope this report will help federal agencies and other organizations to enhance those capabilities.

Lynda Stanley

Director, Federal Facilities Council