Understanding of each communities’ design and operational requirements is an essential tool to enable a community manager or management companies to deliver the highest standard of services to our customers. Some of the critical details required to create a proper plan include:

• Early involvement by all stakeholders in the process
• Getting access to information that require to manage communities in future
• Setting clear and precise community management strategy
• Making sure the everyone involved in managing the community understands better before they engaged
• Avoiding unreasonable expectations
• Setting and managing community management plan including achievable goals and targets

 Understanding the community is very important from the very beginning. Such understanding should include, but not limited to what was designed and built, amenities, availability of assets, maintenance requirements, reliability, statutory requirements, conducting detailed study of the reserve fund and reinstatement for insurance etc.

 In addition, community managers also need to prepare a management plan that takes into consideration the below key deliverables:

• Understand their community from design and operation point of view
• Assist in getting consistent, secure access to crucial information helps operational efficiency
• Study and develop asset management program including lifecycle management
• Prepare plan for managing of community including supervision and management of service providers needed to operate the community
• Developing community management operation related process and administration
• Focus more on continual Improvement of community based on their community understanding from design and operation perspective
• Setting community financial strategies based on the design and operational requirements
• Developing and measuring performance of the community, including evaluation of service delivery and life cycle of assets
• Compliance management
• Service charge preparation and optimization from day one

Considering all these, the first step to a successful community operation is to engage the community manager / management company from the designing stage itself. By doing so, the highest level of operational efficiency can be attained, complaints can be lessened, and all issues can be addressed by the management with full knowledge of the building requirements. 

 This article is written by Kanagaraj Gurusamy, director, CAIME, and Managing Director of Better Communities OAM.