Facility Managers - $0 SharePoint Work Order System - Scrappy FM

Are you scrappy? Every Facility Management (FM) conference or meeting I've attended, I've noticed the same thing: facility managers (FMs) are being sold something. I have worked for all types of organizations, from Fortune 500 manufacturing companies to startups and mom-and-pop operations. Some have large FM budgets. Some have small ones. One of the smaller ones gave me a clear example of what scrappy actually looks like. In that smaller role, I sat through a vendor pitch for a CMMS platform that would have cost my organization five figures each year. The organization needed a work order system because we were relying on email requests when I started in the role. What they had was SharePoint, already paid for, already approved by IT. It took an afternoon to build a working intake form, a status tracker log and an automated notification workflow inside it — no purchase order required. That's not an argument against vendors. Some problems genuinely need a platform built for scale. Most of the time, the answer is already inside the walls of the organization that's asking for it. Smaller organizations feel this hardest. They have a facility manager, many times just one, and rarely a budget that supports the tools that job actually requires. Because the tools were never there, the systems and processes to manage the facility were never built either. I'm not sure where I heard it first, but "you don't know what you don't know" has stuck with me throughout my career. Managing a facility well only works when you have the data to understand how it's performing — and that data comes from a work order system, a preventive maintenance program, an inventory of spare parts, and a way to maintain that inventory. Without those four in some form, there's nothing to manage against. The following principles have been my starting point for FM roles, especially when my organization was resource constrained: - Use what you have before you buy what you want - Know exactly where the free tool stops working - Spend the budget where it moves the needle, not where it's easiest to spend I'm calling this Scrappy FM. Real, specific ways to build those four systems with tools you already own — SharePoint, Excel, Power Automate — and increasingly, with AI doing the heavy lifting on top of them. Along with an honest account of where those tools hit their ceiling and it's time to buy the real thing. First post: how to build that same $0 work order system in SharePoint in one afternoon. The exact steps. But this isn't meant to stay one-way. I want it to grow into a place where we trade scrappy stories, tricks and fixes with each other — a series I hope grows organically, built as much by the FMs reading it as by me. If you've built something out of what you had instead of what you wished you had, I want to hear about it. Not every FM has a five-figure budget for the bells and whistles. Every FM has the tools to start anyway. #FacilityManagement #IFMA #ScrappyFM #FM