Alisa Griffin

Alisa Griffin

Project: Commissioning a LEED Museum

School: The Catholic University of America

Major: MS in Facilities Management

So far, my summer at the Smithsonian has included a variety of facility support tasks and shadowing opportunities for hands on experience in facilities operations and maintenance. I have spent time at three different museums (National Museum of African American History and Culture, National Museum of American History, and the National Museum of Natural History) doing the following:

  • Preparing commissioning (testing building subsystems) information for the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, including reviewing construction specifications and operations and maintenance manuals for newly installed equipment
  • Safely navigating a construction site to identify equipment and spaces for commissioning activities
  • Preparing and giving a presentation on the importance of personal protective equipment (PPE) and safety on the job at an annual Safety Stand Down (debriefing)
  • Interviewing managers within the Systems Engineering Division (SED) to develop articles for a newsletter
  • Fine tuning the mission and vision statements of SED’s various branches to create a unified strategic document
  • Attending various Institution-wide and intern event, including the staff picnic and behind the scenes tours at various museums

Newsletter articles that I am working on:

  • Life Safety: An overview of their life safety inspection program and maybe touch on the quantity of calls they receive after hours.
  • High Voltage: This team responds to power outages frequently. I was thinking an article about safe practices when responding to a site without power and maybe a recent event documented.
  • Contracts: Our two big IDIQs have service imbedded into the contract language. Are our roofers and elevator mechanics being called in for no reason? What after hour services are provided and how frequent?
  • Systems Reliability: How is the relatively new centralized RCM process going? Are we adding more critical assets? Are the Zones fixing the issues we identified?
  • Environmental: An overview of the recent underground storage tank issues and how we could have avoided the chaos.
  • Building Automation: An overview of FISMA and what it actually means. How much effort is involved in maintaining it?
  • OFEO-Help: What’s involved in being a member of OFEO-Help? Are there call trends that show our name is out there and we are being called more frequently? What’s the most common call?
  • Assessments: What is parametric estimating and how is it useful? Should the trend be to go to knowledge based inspections to get more detailed information?