Impact of space management to core business of sri lankan higher education sector: facilities management perspective

Abstract

Education is a basic need of all human beings in the world as it turns a right of humans. Higher Education Institution (HEI) sector in any economy has responsibility to provide high skills professionals who participate to develop the economy. The outcomes of the HEI depends on satisfaction of occupants and effective environment in HEI. Thus, Space Management (SM) in HEI become an essential function in order to achieve the effective outcome from HEI. SM is one of the disciplines of Facilities Management (FM). However, Sri Lankan HEI sector has less concern to manage space in order to ensure the effective outcome from HEI. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the impact of SM from FM perspective in Sri Lankan HEI sector to improving core business. This study was approached using the mixed method. Quantitative approach was applied to measure the satisfaction on existing SM in HEI sector and qualitative approach was to determine suitable SM concepts and strategies to overcome the causes of dissatisfaction on SM. Data collection was carried out through questionnaire survey from both students and academic staff of HEI’s and semi structured interviews from both experts on construction designing and workplace planning. The gathered data were analysed through Statistical Package for Social Science Software (SPSS) in terms of content analysis and Relative Important Index (RII) to determine satisfaction against the existing SM. As the finding revealed that, different SM strategies under six main SM concepts which are healthy living, open space, key model space, modern workplace, universal design and common SM to overcome existing SM issues such as space allocation is not aligning with functional requirement, poor ventilation, poor visual and acoustic comfort, poor design specification and arrangements, unavailability /not enough space, insufficient parking and lack of disabled persons’ space.