John Cole, Director of Facilities Management, Expo City talks to the Built Environment magazine about repurposing the site for long-term occupancy, the management of the landmark Expo 2020, and his learning through the last three years. 

Q: Please tell us about your appointment as the director of facilities management at Expo City?

I joined in May of 2019, and I came in with a role of setting up what we called the landlord's office, which is essentially an asset management department. A lot of asset management is facilities management so before the event, we changed my role to become much more focused on facilities management in the lead up and preparations for the event itself. 

Since then a lot of my time was taken to bring the team cohesively together, making sure our vision was right for the event and the global focus it would have. Elevating it from being not just about the back of the house, which is so important, but to transfer that knowledge and know-how to the front of house as well. We had to get everyone on the same page so that our stakeholders had a good understanding of what our abilities were and what we could pull out of the bag at any moment.  I was given that wonderful opportunity of running the FM department back in October 2019 and ever since then, we've gone from strength to strength. From being able to set up for the global event, manage it and also take it down which then brought about a kind of realignment with our job titles, which is when I was made Director of FM. 

Q: Could you give us an insight into the management of the Covid-19 pandemic at the Expo site? 

With the Covid-19 pandemic came a lot of uncertainty and the uncertainty was almost as bad as the covid virus itself from a management perspective. It was crisis management at scale, continuously. We knew we still had to do business, we knew we had to keep people safe, and so therefore, we embarked on a journey with a team of highly skilled, professional, hardworking people to ensure that we kept the sites alive because we were still preparing for the event. To do this, we looked into all the best practices and then we went on to improve the best practices. We went into partnership with many of our suppliers who were covid conscious and we worked closely with them about strategising the way forward. On top of that, we had a robust system of keeping our own teams safe by having them tested every day to make sure that we didn't contribute to any problems towards the end goal. 

During the Expo 2020, from an FM perspective, we took the best practices and we made them better. We instituted regimes from wipe down of touch surfaces minimally every thirty minutes and increasing the frequency potentially on the exhibition spaces where the touch screens or interaction between guests was extremely high. We had staff positioned next to such areas ready to wipe it down after every interaction. We really pushed the limits of managing the space through our regimes but at the same time we looked at how we were managing waste. For example, while we had taken the hand dryers away from the washrooms and replaced them with tissue paper, that tissue paper was then put very carefully into a recycling scheme, which can then obviously contribute to our eighty five percent diversion from waste that was to be sent to landfills. We instituted new regimes, but we were cognizant of the effect of any action down the line so we managed that as well. It was a very intrinsically thought-through and carefully managed process. This also involved clear communication with our stakeholders, such as our country pavilions. 

Q: Could you highlight the similarities or the experiences that you bought from your previous work to the Expo site?

The biggest attribute I brought to the role was stakeholder management. Which might surprise you because it is not technical, it is more about managing the people around you to allow them to benefit the most from the services that you provide. At a site like the Expo, this becomes even more important because it is a site that is continuously evolving with considerable infrastructure or building works or amendment works. You have items that you want to improve on a daily basis because it is easier to manage them or easier to maintain them but in order to make all those changes or in order to understand those changes, you need an element of stakeholder management. This is not traditionally within the facilities management major focus areas. I sometimes compare facilities management staff to the coal boys in the film Titanic. Throughout the film we see snapshots of two men shovelling coal into the boilers to keep the rooms heated, and to keep the ship sailing. They are performing their jobs until the very last moment, even with the people on the deck trying to jump into lifeboats and escape the sinking vessel. The passengers don't see them, and don't know about them, and don't understand the critical nature of their job but they are a vital part in the functioning and they are the unsung heroes. I hence feel this to be the biggest attribute I brought to the Expo site - my ability to hold relationships with every single stakeholder and explain to them how it works.

Q: What were the operational challenges of the Expo site as a built environment in terms of skill and complexity?

It is a city and is much bigger than the Principality of Monaco and it dwarfs the Vatican City, the smallest country in the world. If you look at the magnitude and the footprints of laws, you are running a city and you have all the main stakeholders that you generally have in any city such as the fire department, and the ambulance services and the police department so the enormity of the project was a challenge in terms of scale. The other challenges we had was obviously the restriction on time to manage the maintenance, and we couldn't do a lot of our cleaning because we had visitors for about 18 hours a day. All of our maintenance had to be scheduled for the night. 

We were looking at extremely dangerous pieces of equipment, using high level access equipment to get to the top of all of these buildings, we had engineers working in the middle of the night to maintain air conditioning systems to electrical systems. 

Overall, the biggest challenge was keeping the standards of the entire facility consistent. Inevitably, someone somewhere along the line or a piece of equipment along the line, says I don't want to play today and that can have a big knock-on ramification and add extra hours to your schedule. 

Scheduling cleaning and maintenance throughout the night and preparing for the next day which also saw new activities, new initiatives was immensely challenging. 

Q: From Expo 2020 to Expo City - how much of the original infrastructure has been retained? How are you repurposing them? 

When we opened up in October of 2022 to the public we opened up all of the toilets and the normal public facilities that you saw and experienced when you came in for Expo 2020. We have retained many pavilions such as Al Wasl Plaza, Terra – the Sustainability Pavilion and the Women’s Pavilion. We've opened up the Stories of Nations, which are three pavilions which tell the story of what Expo was - the different countries that came and contributed to it. The great news is we have managed to retain all of the core infrastructure, so all of the sewage, all of the storm networks, all of the gas networks, all of the irrigation networks, all of the main infrastructures is still here today. 

This will become part of the legacy projects, which are going to be the city projects. If you look at the site as a whole, at least ninety percent of that has stayed intact as it was in the Expo and is being used in the same manner today. 

We have new companies coming in that will be our long-term tenants. We estimate that fifteen hundred to two thousand people every day will be coming in and out for work to this site. 

Q: Could you highlight a couple of technology platforms that you're deploying in terms of managing the properties. 

We have always wanted to be technologically very sound and this was how we started out. We hence deployed a computer-aided-facility management (CAFM) system that allows us to produce work orders and service requests to our service providers. This in turn allowed us to respond to them in a timely manner, and that timely manner is set into the contract that we've written. Whether it is an emergency, whether it is a reactive work order or whether it is just PPM all of these are regulated very strongly. The CaFM system allows me to utilise information on the behaviours of my buildings. It allows me to understand if it's working efficiently, if it's not working efficiently, which pieces are breaking down the most, which are not breaking down, how many man hours I am spending on these jobs and how many spare parts and recycle replacement parts am I using in all of these parts. Eventually it allows me to build a history behind the building that allows me to look at the data to then make decisions such a replacing a particular part or replacing an entire equipment system. It allows me to have a controlled procurement process where I can actually genuinely prove to the decision makers that I am going to save you money, not just spend money just for the sake of it.

I have a team who are consistently looking and working with sensors and BTU units within the buildings. We have a network of highly sophisticated sensors connected to the building management system that talks to the energy department that then allows us to look at information to manage our energy consumption. 

Q: What are the systems being put in place to prepare for the COP28 conference? 

The broad management will start with dividing the whole city into two zones – there will be a blue zone which will host the COP conferences and there will be the green zone which will be open to the public and our long-term tenants which will tell the stories of environmental change and of sustainability. 

Our focus right now is waste management. We want to make it Net-zero as soon as we possibly can so we are going to be working with our stakeholders – contractors, tenants, us the managers - like we did during the event, to put in place robust checks to ensure we establish a circular economy. We will use the climate conference as an opportunity and a springboard.