Back to all

Facility Assessments: The First Step for Your Building Project - Part 1

April 11, 2022
A view of the elementary school entrance, which features a large environmental branding installation of the area's nearby ecosystems

Part 1: What Is a Facility Assessment?

Facility assessments are a critical first step in your district or municipality’s planning efforts. As you start to plan for your new facilities, it’s important to understand what you already have. A facility assessment will help your stakeholders – and your architect’s design team – decide how to proceed.

What is a facility assessment?

Facility assessments evaluate the condition of your existing buildings. They offer a detailed overview of the buildings from an architectural and engineering perspective.

Here’s an overview of Bray’s facility assessment process:

What’s not included in a facility assessment?

A facility assessment is a report. It will point out our concerns with the architectural and mechanical systems of your existing buildings, but it will not identify solutions or costs associated with fixing them – that will come later in the master planning process.

The assessment team will address only what’s immediately visible in your buildings. They will not analyze any buried or hidden elements that would require partial demolition, extensive investigation, or additional testing.

It’s also important to note that facility assessment is only the first phase of the master planning process. It will not include design concepts or suggestions for what the spaces could be, which will come later in the process.

A study document scorecard example highlights how each aspect of a building is assessed in a color-coded guide

Our study documents include a scorecard for each part of the assessment, providing an easy-to-understand overview of your building and site conditions.

The Study Document

The primary deliverable of a facility assessment is the study document. It’s a comprehensive book that documents the team’s observations. It includes written summaries, diagrams, and photographs of your existing building conditions.

The study document includes evaluations of:

Our team will rank each assessment area using a scale of good, fair, and poor. This ranking system will help you identify the overall condition of each building component and which ones have the greatest need for repair or replacement.

Here are some example assessments from recent study documents:

Up next, we’ll review why you should have a facility assessment in hand before moving ahead with your building projects.

Read Part 2: Why are Facility Assessments Important?


Be sure to also check out:
Part 3: The Facility Assessment Process
Watch our 90-second video on facility assessments


Featured image, top: Bray prepared a facility assessment for Horicon School District – the first step in helping them identify their need for an elementary school addition to the existing middle and high school.


Back to all

Related Articles