Stewardship
Comprehensive Stewardship Group (CSG)
MIT believes that a holistic capital renewal strategy must include a plan for proactive stewardship as well as a plan to address deferred maintenance. While it is important to undertake maintenance remedies that have been postponed, capital renewal is more effective when it also anticipates future maintenance tasks in all of our buildings, including new buildings. Proactive stewardship of our facilities will help us stay ahead of maintenance issues and prevent those issues from piling up year after year.
CSG goals
- Establish a program of comprehensive physical stewardship for MIT's newest and newly renovated buildings and for buildings constructed from this date forward—to help these buildings stay new and retain their capacity to further MIT's mission
- Promote a proactive focus on MIT campus stewardship in day-to-day operations and through proactive renewal planning
- Enhance and evolve stewardship activities with assistance from the community through an advisory group representing the occupants of buildings in the program
- Increase our community's satisfaction with the facilities they use and the facilities services they receive
- Preserve MIT's investment in its facilities and avoid adding to the deferred maintenance backlog
Like most educational institutions, MIT has found that focusing primarily on the construction of new buildings can be detrimental to campus stewardship. We are now pursuing a proactive Comprehensive Stewardship strategy rather than a Reactive Management strategy. Instead of maintaining our buildings only when a dire need or emergency arises, we will maintain them by planning timely upgrades and anticipating potential issues.
Today, as we reinvest in our existing infrastructure, this program will make comprehensive stewardship the standard for all new MIT buildings as well as those constructed within the past decade. Over time, this will help us stabilize the physical deterioration of MIT buildings and reverse the trend of deferring maintenance.
CSG is in the process of conducting building inspections and completing baseline reports to map the current conditions and maintenance history of each building. These reports will help us measure the effectiveness of the program going forward. Our next step will be to develop specific renewal plans for ongoing maintenance and updates in each building.
The CSG program will focus initially on buildings that were constructed after 2002 or have undergone a comprehensive major renovation (involving fundamental systems and/or infrastructure) in the past ten years.
According to APPA repair and maintenance standards, "Reactive Management" entails maintaining buildings on a need-based and unsystematic basis, focusing more on emergency projects and less on issues of normal deterioration. By comparison, "Comprehensive Stewardship" is a more organized approach involving regular, timely upgrades to keep buildings and equipment current with modern standards and usage. (APPA—Leadership in Educational Facilities is an international association of facilities and physical plant departments at educational institutions.)
