At its best, corporate real estate is like Atlas, the mythical Greek god who bore the heavens: Top-flight real estate shoulders strategy. — Jack Lyne
Appropriately, Lucent Technologies’ workplace strategy is dubbed “Project Atlas.” Led by Lucent’s real estate group, Project Atlas is a dramatic, five-year workplace transformation now under way for 24,000 key R&D employees located in Bell Laboratories’ 12 million sq. ft. (1.1 million sq. m.) of mission-critical space. Over 10 years, the project will yield US$200 million-plus in savings. In addition, the reconfiguration will shave set-up costs for new employee work space from $2,800 to $500.
But that only partially explains why Atlas is the most recent winner of the prestigious Best Practice Workplace Award presented by the International Development Research Council (IDRC), the world’s preeminent corporate real estate association. Striking in its scale and long-term impact, Atlas goes beyond wedding real estate and corporate mission. It also extends the ambitious designs set out in IDRC’s groundbreaking Corporate Real Estate 2000TM (CRE2000) research,
“Atlas exemplifies and goes beyond the CRE 2000 ‘business strategist’ role,” says Real Estate Vice President Tony Marano. “It anticipates business trends, monitors and measures their impacts [and] contributes to the value of the corporation as a whole, focusing on the company’s mission, [not] solely on real estate.”
Faster to Market
Indeed, perhaps Atlas’s greatest strategic contribution lies in promoting faster product development, which often marks the difference between high-tech’s masters and martyrs. Customer needs and market conditions are integrated into the early stages of product conceptualization, speeding salable products to market. As Marano explains, Atlas’s workplace reconfiguration “redirects talent from pure research into product development,” through a series of “planning principles”:
• Zoning the workplace by interactivity, positioning highly interactive work along primary circulation routes, inter-team interactivity on secondary routes and private space in the most isolated areas.
• Creating “Caf? Forums” at main circulation nodes to facilitate social interaction and spontaneous idea development.
• Locating shared services along “Main Streets” to promote communication.
• Designing individual work areas with sliding glass doors that facilitate teamwork and reconfigurations.
• Providing “transient workstations” for visitors.
• Creating “project work rooms” for long-term teamwork.
‘Execute Quickly, Thoroughly’
For real estate practitioners, though, the steps that created Project Atlas hold critical lessons.
Benchmarking triggered one key step. “Lucent’s R&D community, engineers and scientists at heart did not readily accept the premise that existing conditions were inadequate,” says Marano. Top management buy-in came quickly, however, after viewing some sobering benchmark data from Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Octel and Oracle. By comparison, Lucent’s space per person was 20 to 30 percent higher, even though its workstations were smaller. Competitors were also beating Lucent’s revenue per gross square foot.
Mandate secured, Lucent’s real estate arm began mapping 30-plus focus groups’ work patterns, processes and styles, while its “SWAT teams” assessed the 12.5 million sq. ft. of space in a mere 30 days.
Simultaneously, Lucent’s information technology arm mounted its “Communication, Computing and Collaboration” initiative, developing pre-formatted, digitized desktop publishing systems.
The real estate-IT linkage supported Marano’s idea that “workplace transformations require a systemic, holistic approach . . . considering people, organizational structures and processes, information technologies and the work setting as a system, so a change in one part is accompanied by corresponding changes in the other parts.”
Ten Atlas pilot programs were implemented, each with a senior management “sponsor,” Marano explains, “[ensuring that] each of the senior scientific leaders could personally engage the local community in a dialogue about the new culture and workplace.” The pilots led to refinements, while also reducing change fears and creating “a groundswell of interest in the transformation,” he says.
But while careful planning was a critical in Atlas’s success, so was execution, which rivaled the speed of a Zeus thunderbolt.
“In today’s dynamic business world, as context, problem definition and solutions continually change, slow and incomplete action spells the death of any significant initiative,” Marano emphasizes.” Once you have leadership’s attention and commitment, execute quickly and thoroughly before its focus shifts.”
SS
