A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to travel to Phoenix for IFMA World Workplace 2011. For those of you not intimately familiar with the facility management profession, IFMA is the International Facility Management Association and World Workplace is the organization’s annual conference – typically about 5,000 folks from around the world attend.  IFMA is one of my favorite organizations – lots of really wonderfully nice (and smart, and interesting) people!

This year, Angie Earlywine and I were selected to present a concurrent session: Space Matters – New Ways of Maximizing Space Utilization, and I was selected to present Make the Most of Social Media for Your Business, Your Group, and Yourself.  

We weren’t the only HOK folks speaking.  Pete Winters of the Dallas office shared his opinion on the metric system, as well as some other valuable information in his session: Global Facility Planning – Do I Know What I Don’t Know?  Steve Parshall (Houston) and Robin Ellerthorpe  wowed audiences with their take on BIM and programming in their presentation: Just Go With It – Developing Programming for Architects in a BIM/IWMS World (featuring a preview of Steve’s upcoming book: Problem Seeking, 5th edition).

Due to some client obligations and some unfortunate mishaps with air travel, I missed most of the “fun” parts of the conference (for example, Welcome Reception at Chase Field – home of the Arizona Diamondbacks – good thing the D-backs missed the World Series).  That said, I did have a few major highlights from the event:

1. A visit from Michael Cason from the Office of the Architect of the Capitol (the AOC is my longest-standing client: I’ve been working with them literally since the day I started at HOK over six and a half years ago) - MC is a great guy  and it’s always nice to have a friendly face in the audience (even if it does mean higher expectations!).
2. A big hug from Bob Maynard of GlaxoSmithKline. Bob is one of the nicest people you’ll ever meet, and I was so happy to get to spend some quality time with him on the Expo floor.  See the slideshow below for a picture of me and Bob, and also a picture of what Bob made me do. 
3. A warm welcome from moderator Rod Stevens at my social media presentation. Rod is a big IFMA supporter, and a fantastic friend to HOK.  He even managed to get the audience laughing at 8 am…without any inappropriate language or behavior.

Check out some of my photos from the event…including a couple of shots of my hotel room (nothing exemplary – good or bad), and the airplane that ended up going back and forth from the terminal to the runway for hours on end…I should have known it was doomed based on the tail design (go Redskins!):

 Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.