Lessons Learned

Marketing and managing the GCLF has provided many insights into the facility management structures at Harvard. Below follows some of the lessons learned over the first two years of program management.

Engaging Busy Facility Managers

Over time it has become evident that the most effective way to engage facility managers in using the GCLF is to invite them to participate in the loan fund approval process. This ensures that busy managers turn up to a meeting once a month to focus their attention on the topic of campus efficiency upgrades. It also enables peer-to-peer learning, encouragement and acknowledgement.

Accounting Structures: Hindrances or Enablers

The often rigid accounting separation between capital project and operating budgets can make it difficult for building managers to avail of GCLF financing. Under the GCLF model, the HGCI provides the upfront project capital that enables a project sponsor to save money on its utility bills. Many department financial managers, however, are not used to repaying a loan out of savings derived from reduced utility bills. As a result of complex energy loads in buildings, project energy savings are often hard to pinpoint, further creating doubt in the minds of financial planners.

If a project is properly planned for and managed, the savings are real. The GCLF allows departments to take money that would normally be sent to the local utility and invest it in infrastructure improvements. Where this is not immediately apparent to department financial managers, time must be spent working through this rationale before time is spent looking for projects. Unless this hurdle is breeched, the GCLF model will not achieve optimal department utilization.

Additional Support Services

While money is often cited as the primary impediment to efficient infrastructure management, there are actually many other impediments that are less apparent, the scarcity of time being the most significant. Working with facility managers, the HGCI has developed a range of services to support with:

  • Project identification and feasibility assessment
  • Rebates and grants
  • Project management and implementation
  • New technology identification and evaluation
  • Targeted education and training for building and facility managers, occupants and clients
  • Publicity and communication

The majority of successful loan funded projects have benefited from one or more of these HGCI services.

Project Proponents

Depending on a department’s size and the structure of its facility management department, GCLF projects can be proposed by many different employees. In some departments, the facility director will take an active role in directly managing the search for GCLF-eligible projects. In other cases, facility directors take a less active role, deferring to their building managers responsibility for project identification.

The HGCI has found that the departments most effective in taking advantage of GCLF financing are those that have a facility director managing the search for and implementation of GCLF projects. This high level engagement sends a strong message to all facility employees that fiscal and environmental responsibility are a department priority, and that innovation and initiative to meet those responsibilities will be rewarded.

In departments where facility directors take a more passive stance, project identification normally stalls and project proposals do not materialize. Facility managers are constantly under pressure to address any number of pressing issues. Unless they understand that efficiency is a priority in their work program, it will often be reprioritized as non-essential to building operations.

Project Drivers

While the benefits of GCLF financing are intuitive and produce immediate returns for participating departments, there are a number of different selling points of the program. Some of those participation drivers include:

    • Financial return - Many departments are sold on the financial return on investment of GCLF projects.
    • Alternative source of capital - Departments with capital financing constraints can look to the GCLF as an alternative source for new, interest-free capital.
    • Public relations - Departments leverage the press generated by GCLF participation, or respond to seeing their name absent from the list of program participators. This inter-department competition and sense of accountability to university planners has generated initiative on many new project proposals.

GCLF Program Management

The responsibilities associated with GCLF program management have changed dramatically over the program’s duration. We initially anticipated that the program manager would spend a majority of time marketing the program and administering the fund management. While expectations were met for the program’s first six months, over time position responsibilities have changed to direct greater focus to actively assisting departments in project identification and management capacities. Fund administration is less time intensive than is providing the department support necessary to identify and complete projects eligible for GCLF financing.

Continuing the Learning

The Loan Fund has achieved significant environmental and fiscal benefits but must not be thought of as the incentive needed to drive sustainable building and infrastructure decisions. In fact, if anything, the Loan Fund program has been most helpful in identifying the numerous other competencies, services, and additional financial incentives that Harvard must develop if it is ever to approximate sustainable campus operations. This statement does not detract from the Fund’s significant achievements to date, but rather serves as a reminder that we are at the beginning, not the end, of the long sustainability learning curve.