The contract has been awarded, service begins on the first of the month, and three days beforehand the new contractor's site supervisor rings to ask where to collect the keys. It emerges that nobody knows how many keys there are. The outgoing contractor put them into circulation over eight years, no list exists, and the locking system cannot be changed at short notice.
So the start begins with an improvised solution, and that is symptomatic. Omissions from this phase carry on for years where nobody corrects them early. And some findings become hard to establish once service has begun, the initial condition above all.
A note on the timeline: the title speaks of eight weeks, meaning the eight weeks from the start of service. The preparation before that belongs to it, which makes the whole exercise closer to twelve weeks from the award.
Why this phase in particular
Three reasons.
The condition on handover can be established only once, and only before the new contractor has worked the areas itself. After that, any discussion about whether damage was already there runs in vague terms.
Expectations form during this period. Users who gain a poor impression in the first weeks hold it considerably longer than the service warrants. Complaints arising in week two still resonate in month twelve.
And working routines set. What emerges as a process in the first weeks is only changed later with considerable effort. A round layout that does not work is not corrected but compensated for, and the compensation usually consists in something being left out.
Phase 1: the weeks before service begins
This phase does not exist in many procedures, because too little time falls between award and start of service. Anyone not allowing for it catches up later, but then during live operations.
What belongs in it:
Handover of the basics. Building plans, room schedule or area listing, existing concepts, hygiene plans, operating hours, occupancy plans, access arrangements. The client should bundle these documents before being asked for them one at a time.
Settling access. How many keys or fobs are needed, who provides them, by when, and who gets which rights. With electronic systems, setting up takes longer than everyone assumes.
Naming the contacts on both sides. By name, with contact details and with a deputy. A contract naming only companies does not work day to day.
Scheduling the periodic services. The agreed interval becomes a window with a latest completion date and advance notice. Do this now and you save yourself the argument about whether an annual service was even due in the first contract year.
The contractor's mobilisation plan. Who works from when in which area, how familiarisation is organised, when the site supervisor is on site. The client should want to see it.
Phase 2: readiness check the day before
Before the first day of service, a short formal check of whether the start is viable at all is worthwhile. Ten questions will do. Is the minimum staffing available? Have the required qualifications been checked? Is building-specific familiarisation complete? Do keys and access profiles work in a test? Are emergency call and escalation routes set up? Are materials and equipment on site? Is the round or duty planning plausible? Have the critical documents been released? Are the contacts on both sides reachable? And are the open points documented with a risk level and an interim arrangement?
Where critical points stay open, the answer is not to start anyway and hope. It is an agreed interim arrangement for the service concerned, in writing and time-limited.
Phase 3: handover day and recording the existing condition
The most important step of the whole mobilisation is almost never carried out: the documented recording of the condition on handover. Its place is immediately before the start of service, or on the handover day itself, not in the first or second week of the contract. After two weeks the new contractor has worked the areas, and the distinction is lost.
For large buildings this works in two stages: the damage-prone and high-value areas in full before the start, the remainder as a sample with a short additional period for areas that were not accessible beforehand. How long it takes depends on the building; for an office building it is a day, for a hospital group considerably more.
It protects both sides. The contractor against being held liable for damage it inherited. The client against damage that genuinely arose later being dismissed on the basis that it was always like that.
The record is made room by room, with photographs, from reproducible positions and with a date. What gets recorded is the condition of surfaces, visible damage, the polish build-up, the state of the sanitary areas and the ancillary rooms.
With photographs, a photography protocol needs to be in place before anyone sets off. Pictures from offices catch screens, name plates and documents; in security areas they catch system details. Purpose, access, retention period and deletion should be settled, and sensitive areas excluded or obscured.
For the security side, recording the technical provision sits alongside this: which systems are present, what their maintenance and inspection status is, which faults are known, who is responsible and what the interface with the security service looks like. Nothing gets activated in the process without agreement with the operator and the receiving centre; a spontaneous function test quickly produces a real response.
Also belonging in this phase is checking the documents handed over against reality. Area figures rarely hold after two refurbishments, and discrepancies should be established now rather than at the first invoice check.
Phase 4: weeks 1 to 5, settling in
Problems arise in this phase, and some of them are to be expected. Others are not, and the distinction should be settled before the start.
To be settled in are routes that are not yet second nature, minor communication gaps, fine-tuning of rounds and open documentation questions without consequences. To be dealt with immediately are unstaffed positions, missing qualifications, uncleaned critical areas, a non-functioning alarm route, unauthorised access and breaches on hazardous substances or hygiene. The obligation to perform begins with the agreed start of service, not eight weeks later.
Four patterns are typical. Rounds do not work out in the time available, because travel times were underestimated. Areas are missing from the plan, usually ancillary rooms, basement areas or areas added after a refurbishment. Access does not work as intended. And the first user complaints arrive, frequently about things that were exactly the same before.
The client should be reachable during this phase and should bundle the feedback rather than passing it on piecemeal. For ordinary reports, a consolidated list once a week is worth more to both sides than fourteen separate emails. Critical reports go out immediately, significant ones within a working day.
And it should keep two things apart: what is simply not yet running smoothly and what cannot work structurally. The first sorts itself out, the second has to be changed, and the difference shows in whether the problem has a cause in the plan.
Phase 5: inspections, staged rather than one-off
Eight weeks without an inspection is too long. By then processes have set, and what would have been a correction in week one is a habit in week eight.
A staged approach makes sense. On day one, staffing, access and the critical processes. At the end of week one, a short check of the services where a failure has immediate effect. In weeks two and three, targeted checks where start-up problems have shown themselves. And in weeks four to six, the first full inspection as a position-fixing exercise, from which the baseline emerges.
At the end of week eight there is then no longer an inspection date but a joint conversation about what the inspections have shown.
The full inspection serves three purposes. It establishes where the service actually stands. It creates the first point in a series from which a development can later be read. And it sets the standard, because both sides see how measurement is done and against what.
From its result follows the adjustment: revising rounds, correcting area figures, re-training on specific points, settling open interfaces. After that the exercise moves into normal operation.
What gets checked in that inspection, and how a sample has to be constructed so that it stays comparable, we address separately.
What the client has to contribute
Start-up problems arise predominantly at the interfaces between client, outgoing contractor and incoming contractor. The share the client itself has in hand is regularly underestimated.
A contractor cannot familiarise anyone if it does not know which floor covering is where. It cannot plan rounds if the area figures are out of date. It cannot organise access if the authorisations are not granted. And it cannot meet expectations nobody has communicated to it.
Four contributions are indispensable: current documents, timely decisions, a named person with time for this phase, and a communication to users that a change is taking place and what it means. The last point costs one circular email and prevents a substantial share of the early complaints.
The most common start-up mistakes
Too short a lead time. How long the lead time has to be depends on contract volume, staffing requirement, qualifications needed, access vetting and the number of sites. A small building starts faster. Where fifteen staff have to be recruited, familiarised and equipped, two weeks certainly do not suffice.
No record of the condition. The mistake whose consequences only become visible after years, and then expensively.
Starting on the worst possible date. A start on 1 January runs into leave and public holidays. Holiday periods, on the other hand, are not bad per se; they lend themselves well to mobilisation, familiarisation and deep cleaning, where service begins shortly before operations resume.
No named point of responsibility on the client side. Where every question goes to a different place, the contractor's site supervisor spends the first week working out whom they are allowed to ask.
Requiring full duty rosters. The client needs the positions staffed, the qualifications, the deputising arrangement and how to reach the management. It needs the internal deployment planning by name only so far as access and security requirements demand it.
Silence until the first escalation. Saying nothing for eight weeks and then sending a defects list wastes eight weeks in which everything could have been sorted out.
The milestone plan as a contract annex
Everything described here fits into a two-page annex: who does what by when, for both sides, with dates running from the award.
The value lies less in the plan itself than in the fact that it makes the client's contribution visible. A contractor chasing documents does so reluctantly, because it does not want to make itself unpopular at the outset. A date in a shared plan does it for them.
What to settle before the next mobilisation
How much time lies between the planned award and the start of service, and does it suffice for recruitment?
Who on your side is responsible during these eight weeks, and does that person have the time for it?
Are the documents the new contractor needs available, and are they current?
Is a record of the condition planned, and is it settled who carries it out?
The fourth question is the one whose answer you need last and regret longest if it is no.