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The two‐fold purpose of this paper is identifying areas of difficulty in managing the needs of end‐users in the course of the design and delivery of construction projects and suggesting possible solutions.

The focus of the paper is the interaction between three principal parties: end‐users, project leader (a selected end‐user) and facility planner (a facilities professional). The context is two projects in the public sector: a university and a hospital. The end‐users of both are known from the start and participate in the whole process. The paper is based on a case study comprising 12 interviews – seven end‐users and five professionals.

The research shows that during the project's design and delivery, communication and attitudinal problems have to be managed alongside the inherent difficulty of understanding end‐users' real needs. To help in managing these issues, facility planners relied heavily on pedagogical and behavioural skills, rather than formalised methods as found in the literature.

The findings highlight areas of difficulty for managers and planners and how these areas were handled in practice. Suggestions on how to resolve some of the areas are presented and discussed.

Much of the research related to managing end‐users focuses on how to extract value from the construction process, for instance providing greater flexibility and improved air quality. This paper concentrates on relations between parties who are central to the briefing, design and delivery process

This chapter addresses the challenges associated with temporary organising under conditions of institutional complexity. The authors draw on findings from an in-depth case study of a megaproject initiated to reshape healthcare in Sweden. At the centre of this transformation was the construction of a new, ‘world-class’ hospital to replace the former (historical and renowned) university hospital. The authors posit that organising such projects is largely a matter of creating, responding to, and re-creating temporal institutional complexity. Thus, their study identifies four distinct response strategies – innovating, partial decoupling, avoiding, and surfing – on which project actors relied when dealing with the multiplicity of temporal institutional requirements. The authors propose a model for explaining how these strategies affected the temporal institutional complexity faced by the project. Their chapter adds to the literature on temporary organisations by highlighting the nature and dynamics of temporal institutional complexity and by revealing how inter-institutional temporary organisations cope with such complexity.

Temporary organisations are time-limited organisations that are created with a deliberate termination point. Temporary organisations can increase flexibility, allow for innovative and transformative activities with less resource commitment, and reflect a ‘Zeitgeist’ of acceleration and time limitation in society. They also give rise to tensions and paradoxes that require new adaptive and coordinative practices. Research on temporary organisations has moved from primarily exploring the distinction between temporary and permanent organisations to using temporary organisations to study a range of phenomena such as temporality, acceleration, identity, and attachment–detachment dilemmas. This volume reflects this new orientation. We map empirical phenomena along the lines of events, projects and networks, and explore three conceptual themes that run through the nine chapters that comprise this volume: (1) temporality in temporary organisations; (2) the interaction between temporary and permanent organisations; and (3) the strategies and practices that temporary organisation develop in response to tensions and paradoxes.

The development of sustainable facilities management (FM) practices requires active and integrated engagement of the FM organization. Building on a three-year research project (2015-2018) within Nordic Built that aims to strengthen FM competencies in the Scandinavian countries, this paper aims to list and document the challenges and barriers of implementing sustainability as identified by the Scandinavian FM practitioners who took part in this research.

The paper builds on the understanding gained from using an interpretive sociological approach and uses qualitative mixed methods to collect data from four workshops, group sessions and expert group discussions with a mix of representatives including owners, property managers, facilities managers, consultants, teachers and academics. Four case studies were completed of refurbishment projects implementing sustainable solutions; these encompassed in-depth interviews with the stakeholders, site visits, observations of meetings and gathering project documentation. The data were complemented by a systematic literature review on a selection of topics focusing on articles referring directly to FM, the sustainability of FM, ends-user and stakeholder involvement, energy performance and sustainability. The challenges and barriers identified in practice were compared to those found in the literature.

The concept of sustainability, and its different dimensions and implications, seems to be well understood now by the practitioners who participated in this study, who claimed they were able to provide the required solutions. What seems to be lacking, though, is the possibility of convincing the end-users, who are expected to operate and maintain the facilities, to act according to the standards that these solutions require. It appears to be easier to focus on the technical aspects than on the end-users’ behaviors. The practitioners reported a shortage of social competencies and tools to deal with the situation, and despite an increasing awareness of smart technology, they lacked solutions to engage the end-users in optimizing the facilities. Besides, not all FM companies were well equipped to face the challenges imposed by the sustainable agenda; the small and medium enterprises in particular seemed to be struggling to implement the different dimensions of sustainability.

The limitation of this research rests in the chosen research approach as it focuses on the FM practitioners. The contribution of the end-users’ perspective is not strongly represented or systematically explored, but is identified as a new topic that needs to be investigated further to provide further insight. This study focuses on refurbishment and/or retrofit of existing buildings and the operation of facilities. The authors do not embrace the design phase or the construction phase of new buildings.

The paper underlines the need for frameworks and concrete tools to help FM practitioners to integrate the social and cultural aspects of sustainability. It identifies end-users, both in housing and in offices, as creating a bottleneck to the implementation of sustainable FM. To gain insight into this bottleneck, the authors suggest implementing a sociologically inspired method using an integrative approach. Highlighting such issues will mean that future research will be able to define further solutions for managing and maintaining existing and future built assets and fulfilling sustainability requirements by engaging end-users. This study also emphasizes the need to introduce these topics as part of the curriculum for FM education.

This paper provides an update on the level of the development of sustainable FM in the three Scandinavian countries. This is highly relevant for Scandinavian practitioners, but the authors consider this relevant for international practitioners, researchers, academics and teachers and developers as well. Practitioners and researchers are invited to join in these efforts to explore how to find practical frameworks, tools, policies and instruments and new services that will improve sustainable FM practices.