A facility manager at a Fortune 500 company inherited a three-year-old building. Beautiful glass façade, open concept, everything modern. HVAC zones that made no sense for actual occupancy. A building management system that required two different platforms to operate. Equipment manuals that existed only as a PDF stack on someone’s retired laptop.

“They never asked us,” she said. “Not once during design. Not during construction. They handed us the keys and said good luck.”

If you’re nodding, you’ve lived this. And it all traces back to decisions made during project initiation, before anyone asked the people who would actually have to operate the building.

The charter is not paperwork

Most project charters are treated as a formality. Signature page. Box checked. Move to schematic design.

What they should be is an insurance policy, the moment when someone writes down what success actually looks like. Not on ribbon-cutting day. On day 500, when the warranty has expired, the building manager is on their third maintenance call of the morning, and the budget conversation is happening with a CFO who wasn’t around when the design decisions were made.

When that question doesn’t get asked, someone still answers it. The architect answers it with design preferences. The contractor answers it with what’s easiest to build. The equipment manufacturer answers it with whatever they sell. The facility team inherits the sum of all those answers, answers to a question no one posed to them.

The people who aren’t in the room cost the most money

The typical charter table: executive leadership, architect, financial advisors, maybe a construction manager. Sometimes a leasing agent.

The people missing: facility management, property management, the building engineer who will spend the next thirty years in that mechanical room. The people who know that a beautiful exposed ceiling means HVAC maintenance now requires a 30-foot lift. The people who know that specifying a proprietary building management system means you’re locked to one vendor at whatever price they decide to charge.

The math on this is brutal. Research consistently finds that 30 percent of construction costs are waste: coordination errors, rework, problems that better planning would have prevented. But that’s just the construction waste. The operational waste that flows from poor early decisions runs through your facility budget for decades.

Every equipment spec written without asking who will service it. Every system that requires specialized training to operate. Every material chosen for aesthetics that ages terribly. All of it decided before the facility team was in the room.

One question that changed a building

A healthcare system was building a new outpatient facility. They did something unusual: they invited the facility director to the first design meeting.

That director asked one question: “Who’s going to maintain the green roof?”

No one had thought about it. The architect loved the concept. The executives loved the sustainability story. The green roof required specialized maintenance and a service contract that would cost $40,000 annually, forever. That conversation led to a different design that hit the same sustainability targets without creating a permanent operational cost.

One question. First meeting. Decades of impact.

The practical fix

Getting the right people in the room during charter development is difficult. Schedules conflict. Executives want to move fast. End users can’t visualize a building that doesn’t exist yet.

Do it anyway.

Two weeks of stakeholder alignment at project initiation will save months and significant money during construction. More importantly, it will save years of operational headaches and budget battles for the team that inherits the building.

The people who will operate your building have knowledge your architect doesn’t. They know which equipment vendors actually support their products locally. They know what maintenance contracts look like in practice. They know which “low maintenance” materials actually are and which aren’t.

Before anyone draws a line, ask the people who will live with those lines what they need.