How to Report Building Maintenance Performance to Councillors

Most maintenance reporting to elected members answers a question nobody asked. It reports
volume — requests received, jobs raised, works completed — and volume is close to useless for
the people reading it.

An elected member has a specific job: to answer constituents. What they need from you is
whether things are getting fixed, how long that is taking, and what is stuck. A count of
incoming requests tells them none of that, and a rising count is ambiguous in a way that
invites the wrong conclusion — it might mean the estate is deteriorating, or simply that
reporting got easier.

Lead with what is unresolved and old

The most useful table you can produce is the open list, sorted oldest first, with the age of
each item in days.

It is uncomfortable to present and it is the right thing to present. It answers the question
members are actually being asked at their surgeries, and it directs attention to the small
number of genuinely stuck items rather than spreading it evenly across everything.

A member who can see that four items have been open more than ninety days, and what they are,
is equipped. A member handed a completion percentage is not.

Report resolution time, and report its spread

An average resolution time is a comforting number that hides the problem. Averages are dragged
down by the large volume of quick jobs, and the quick jobs are not what anyone complains about.

Report the middle value and the tail together: the typical time, and how long the slowest tenth
took. The gap between those two numbers is the real story, and it is where service failure
lives.

If you report only one figure, make it the tail. Nobody has ever complained about a repair that
was handled at the typical speed.

Separate what you control from what you do not

Some delay is yours: capacity, scheduling, decision-making. Some is not: a part with a long lead
time, a specialist contractor's availability, access to an occupied building, a decision waiting
on funding.

Split the open list on that line. It is not an excuse — it is the only way a committee can act
usefully. Items in the first group need management attention; items in the second need a
decision, a budget, or nothing at all.

Presenting them mixed together guarantees the discussion goes to the wrong place.

Show the estate, not just the aggregate

Aggregate figures across a whole estate hide the building that is failing. One site generating a
third of all open items is a finding, and it disappears completely in a total.

Break the numbers down by building, even briefly. The outlier is usually visible immediately
and usually already suspected by someone, which is its own kind of validation.

Give repeat failures their own line

An item that has been reported, closed, and reported again is a different animal from a new
issue. It signals either a repair that did not hold or an underlying fault nobody has diagnosed.

Count them separately. A rising repeat rate alongside a falling resolution time is a warning
that jobs are being closed rather than fixed — which is precisely the behaviour that a
completion-percentage target produces if you set one.

Keep the format stable and keep the series

Use the same page shape every cycle. Members will begin comparing rather than reading, which is
when reporting starts to be worth the effort.

Keep the series. Four consecutive reports reveal direction, and direction is the only thing that
distinguishes a bad month from a deteriorating service.

Producing it should be cheap

If assembling this report takes days, it will be produced late, in a rush, from partial data,
and it will not be trusted.

Every figure described here — ages, medians, tails, repeats, per-building splits — is derivable
from a log that records when each job was raised, when it was closed, and where it was. If that
log exists and is current, the report is an extraction. If it does not, the report is an
investigation, and no amount of formatting advice will fix that.