Comparing cleaners for an Ultimo building that runs to a timetable

A cleaning schedule assumes rooms are available at particular hours. A timetable assumes rooms are occupied at particular hours. When the second changes and the first does not, the cleaner arrives at a room in use, defers it, and moves on. Repeat that across a term and several rooms have been cleaned considerably less often than the schedule says and nobody records that it happened at all.

Nobody is at fault. The person setting the timetable has no reason to think about cleaning, and the cleaner has no way to know a booking has moved. The gap is entirely one of information, which means the fix is a communication arrangement rather than a scheduling change. Providers rarely raise this unprompted, so it is worth raising yourself and providers rarely volunteer it during a comparison.

Decide who sends the timetable and when. A responsible person on your side, at the start of each term and whenever a significant change occurs, in whatever format already exists. It does not need to be tidy. What matters is that it arrives, that somebody at the provider reads it, and that the cleaning sequence is adjusted rather than filed and that the change reaches the person actually attending that week.

Ask each provider what they would do with it. A provider who describes updating a site sequence and briefing the attending cleaner has a process. One who says they would work around it is describing improvisation by the person on the ground, which produces exactly the deferred rooms the arrangement was meant to prevent and which the timetable was supposed to prevent in the first place.

Some rooms are restricted by their contents rather than their timetable: laboratories, studios, secure stores, server rooms. Decide the position for each before you invite quotes, whether that is excluded, cleaned under supervision, or cleaned on a scheduled occasion. Tell every bidder, since an excluded room and a supervised one are priced quite differently and a supervised room is priced differently again from an excluded one.

For rooms that never clear, agree an alternative rather than leaving it open. Attended at a different hour, on a different day, or handled by your own staff with the provider covering everything else. Any of those works once decided. What fails is a room that is skipped every week with the deferral recorded nowhere and noticed by nobody and the arrangement quietly delivers less than the document describes.