1. Gather the available records
- Current floor plans, site plans, and building inventory
- Previous assessments, studies, audits, and capital plans
- Asset lists, warranties, commissioning records, and equipment data
- Preventive maintenance schedules, work orders, and backlog reports
- Utility history, indoor environmental records, and known compliance items
- Current projects, approved budgets, and planned funding requests
Incomplete records are common. Note what is missing instead of delaying every observation until the file is perfect.
2. Identify the people who hold operating knowledge
Include facilities staff, building leaders, custodial and maintenance personnel, finance or capital planning staff, technology representatives where relevant, and people who understand how the space is used. Clarify who can answer field questions and who will make prioritization decisions.
3. Plan the site walk
- Confirm access, escorts, occupied-area restrictions, and safety requirements
- Organize the route by building, system, floor, or operational zone
- Prepare a consistent way to record location, condition, evidence, and uncertainty
- Schedule enough time to inspect representative areas, not only visible public spaces
- Arrange follow-up access for concealed or restricted conditions when necessary
4. Review building systems in context
Consider site and drainage, structure and enclosure, roofing, interiors, accessibility, plumbing, HVAC, controls, electrical systems, lighting, fire and life safety, vertical transportation, technology infrastructure, security interfaces, and specialty systems. Observe how systems interact. A roof leak can become an indoor air, learning environment, equipment, and operating continuity issue.
5. Bring maintenance history into the room
Repeated work orders, temporary repairs, unavailable parts, overtime, occupant complaints, and staff workarounds can reveal risk that a single visual inspection misses. Ask which assets consume disproportionate attention and which failures would be hardest to recover from.
6. Agree on risk and priority criteria
Life safety, regulatory exposure, health and learning conditions, operational continuity, water intrusion, energy and resource burden, failure probability, consequence, remaining service life, project dependencies, and readiness for funding.
Define the criteria before ranking projects. This makes tradeoffs easier to explain and reduces the chance that visibility alone determines priority.
7. State the budget constraints
Document known annual limits, grant windows, bond or approval cycles, procurement lead times, staff capacity, and projects already committed. The review should distinguish technical need from what can be sequenced responsibly.
8. Define the expected outputs
- A traceable inventory of observed needs and supporting evidence
- Condition and risk categories with clear definitions
- Immediate actions separated from planned capital work
- Planning-level cost assumptions labeled with their limitations
- Dependencies, phasing considerations, and information gaps
- A decision-ready summary for leadership and governance bodies