Collaboration, Space, Energy, and More: Our Top Stories from 2023 

It’s been a busy year for educational facilities professionals, and there’s no letup in sight for 2024. If you missed some of the insights your peers provided in the pages of Facilities Manager magazine, we’ll help you catch up with this compilation of five articles that really captured readers’ attention in 2023. Find time to wind down this holiday season with their insights—or even browse the full archive (dating back to 1985!)—to reflect on the biggest opportunities and most challenging issues facing facilities leaders today. 

Number one for 2023 was “Collaboration and Planning: Lessons to Ensure Successful Facility Upgrades and Additions,” from the May/June issue. Tim Dean (TRC Companies) and Anthony Lucarelli (Grimm + Parker Architects) outlined guidance for making the most of the “quiet” campus summer months and beyond, including master planning, assessing current conditions, and anticipating future needs. Photos and renderings from William & Mary bring their lessons to life. 

“The Space Entanglement” (July/August 2023) examined the perennial challenge of managing campus spaces in the most efficient way possible. Noting “the opportunity to change the culture and the attitude towards our campus spaces,” Joe Bilotta (JBA Incorporated) wrote that “space is no longer only a facilities issue. It is a university-wide, programmatic issue and must be treated as such.”  

The third most-read article, “Leadership Reimagined” (September/October 2023), excerpted from APPA’s 2023 Thought Leadership Report, which summarized an annual symposium of higher education leaders that APPA has convened since 2006. A major theme of the symposium and report was the importance of addressing critical challenges including investing in leadership development and succession planning, thoughtfully tackling the workforce shortage, and creating an engaging campus climate. 

No week in the life of a facilities leader is complete without considering energy efficiency and carbon reduction, bringing us to the fourth article on our list: “The Importance of Metering and Data Quality” (May/June 2023). Adam Edenfield and Jacob Borcherding (RMF Engineering) explored how a dependable and accurate metering system can provide “critical information required to optimize campus systems, mitigate or anticipate potential failures, and improve efficiency.”  

At number five, “Connecting People to Places: Michigan State University’s Use of Mobile Technologies” (July/August 2023), examined making mobile devices “the backbone of a facilities technological ecosystem that can improve your culture and enable your digital strategy to be deployed at scale.” Our thanks to Daniel Bollman and Adam S. Lawver, both of Michigan State University, for sharing just how their team leverages technology to augment workforce capacity and capability. 

APPA members also read dozens of other great articles in Facilities Manager in 2023, and you can count on even more in 2024. Interested in sharing best practices from your own campus? Check out the 2024 Editorial Calendar and Editorial Guidelines.