Ruth Thaler-Carter is an award-winning freelance writer/editor based in Baltimore, Maryland, who has written often for Facilities Manager. She can be reached at rthaler@aol.com

Because of her active and longtime involvement with APPA and the Eastern Region to date, profiling the association's new President might almost seem unnecessary, but Margaret Patricia "Maggie" Kinnaman always has something new to offer APPA members and the facilities management profession.

Kinnaman, 52, is director of business administration and support services of the Office of Facilities Management at the University of Maryland, Baltimore in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. The sprawling urban campus that is her territory was founded in 1807 and encompasses 50 buildings on 24.4 acres, or 4.34 million gross square feet, 2 million of which is parking garages.

The campus' fall 1998 student enrollment was 5,703. Kinnaman's division has 367 employees in three departments— Architecture, Engineering & Construction; Business Administration & Support Services; and Operations & Maintenance— with responsibility for 40 cost centers. In FY98, Kinnaman's division involved 2.695 million state-supported gross square feet of non-reimbursable maintenance.

Getting into the Profession

Kinnaman entered the facilities management profession "totally by chance," she said, when her first marriage, when she was very young, to a submariner, took her to Sardinia. She had always worked, and "the only thing to do there was to work for the Navy," she recalled; she snagged a position in the public works department of the Navy. A few years later, she came back to Maryland where her family was located and applied for several jobs, one at the University of Maryland, College Park. "Little did I know that my public works stint in the Navy would hold me in good stead here," she said.

Her Navy experience, nontraditional though it was, led Kinnaman to a position as manager of administrative services in the Department of Physical Plant at the University of Maryland, College Park, which she held from November 1980 through September 1985. She took courses at night and got her degree in four years while working full time.

At the College Park campus, Kinnaman managed a 25-person unit that was responsible for providing 680 departmental employees with administrative support, including personnel, timekeeping and payroll, budget development, financial services and risk management. She developed a ten-year history of facilities funding in relation to campus growth, which was a key success factor in the physical plant department's ability to compete effectively for scarce campus resources. She also developed an insurance recovery program for building losses that collected more than $150,000 each year, and a consolidated billing packet for all facilities services for self-support clients on campus.

When her boss at the University of Maryland, College Park campus moved to the Baltimore campus, he told Kinnaman to call him when she got her degree. "Literally when I graduated, there was an assistant director's opening at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and I applied for it." She started as assistant director of the Office of Facilities Management in October 1985.

Nailing the job led her to pursue her MGA through a year-long weekend accelerated master's program that she said was "extremely intensive."

Kinnaman moved up to her current position of director of business administration and support services with the Facilities Management Division in February 1987 after two years as assistant director. She reports to the assistant vice president for facilities management, Robert M. Rowan.

Professional Accomplishments

Kinnaman oversees a 13-person department tasked with providing 400 facilities management employees with administrative services, which include developing an annual budget of $25 million; financial tracking and analysis; cost accounting; construction project accounting; personnel, payroll and time keeping services; and automation support. The division also acts as the billing agent for all reimbursable facilities management services such as maintenance, housekeeping, utilities, and construction.

During her career she has managed the campus programs of mail services, fleet administration and insurance and managed the campus telecommunications program for the three years that it was aligned under facilities management during a campus-wide telecommunications replacement project.

Despite a 40 percent reduction in staff over the past five years, Kinnaman's division has improved and expanded services, she said. Accomplishments include developing a strategic plan; implementing performance standards; collecting benchmarking data; developing, delivering, and analyzing a customer service survey; forming internal and external customer advisory groups; implementing continuous improvement processes to include data collection and peer reviews; and developing a divisional Orientation Guide and Facilities Management Annual Report. "Both of these latter documents serve as models of excellence for other administrative units on campus," Kinnaman said.

Kinnaman also established a new facilities program that has resulted in $3.7 million in new funding over the past three years, to support campus growth of 540,000 GSF. She established a winter and summer coupon payment arrangement with utility vendors to avoid more than $425,000 in late fees over the past four years. She presented this solution to the State of Maryland and worked with them to develop the ultimate solution: electronic payment of utility bills statewide. She implemented a ten-year Centrex C&P Telecommunications contract campus wide, including establishing a billing structure and coordinating a 4,500-station telephone replacement project.

Kinnaman also has conducted a needs assessment and implementation strategy for three major automation projects within facilities management: a work order system, project accounting system, and automated timekeeping system. "These systems enable us to change our focus from one of data collection to one of information dissemination," she said.

Kinnaman also takes pride in having reengineered the campus mail delivery system to focus on performance standards identified by her division's customers—quality, timeliness, and reliability. "The operation changed its focus from a sorting operation to one that provides twice-a-day delivery to more than 200 locations," she said. "All of this was accomplished within existing resources."

She also adapted the APPA Supervisory Skills program to UMB and delivered this seven-module supervisory training program to 45 supervisors within the Facilities Management Division. Currently, Kinnaman's new project is as Y2K risk manager for the campus. This challenge will keep her hopping through the end of the year.

And She Has a Personal Life

Kinnaman is married to John Kinnaman III, who retired recently from the National Security Agency (NSA) after about 36 years, including 20 years spent overseas. "After attending the Cortina Olympics, he became an avid collector and supporter of the Olympics, and has created an entire new career from that interest," Kinnaman said. "He has an Olympic memorabilia business at Savage Mills [a former mill site outside Baltimore that has been converted into one of the largest antique centers on the East Coast], where he also is head of security, and puts together an international show for the Olympics."

The Kinnamans have no children of their own but John has two, both grown; one works at Walt Disney World and the other is a computer professional.

Kinnaman started down the road to her MGA program only three months after she and John got married. "My husband was a saint," she said of the demanding routine she faced in settling into her new job in Baltimore while completing her master's degree.

Kinnaman's work and APPA responsibilities leave little time to relax: "My association work is like a second job." She does create time to enjoy her family—six nieces and nephews "all over the place," the children of her three brothers, and an aunt and uncle in Germany. She enjoys travel, cooking, and entertaining; and she and John are focused on the simultaneous fun and hard work of settling into a new house.

Getting Involved in APPA

Maggie Kinnaman has been in APPA and ERAPPA "at some level" since 1980, including 15 years at the Board level and serving as the first woman president of the Eastern Region.

"If learning is pushing the envelope, then this envelope is ready to pop," she said of all she has learned through her dedicated involvement in APPA. Getting involved in her professional organization "forced me in a very positive way to learn and become confident," Kinnaman said. "It has tested and expanded my levels of competence and has benefited both me as an individual and my institution. It has been invaluable in the resources and tools that I can bring to the job, and the networking has been fantastic."

Kinnaman has retained her strong affection for and commitment to the regional structure of APPA. "All governance of APPA is made up of our regions, so it is essential that the regions and the international APPA work together," she said. "The major thing I've done as I visited the regions and brought back input is to formalize the contributions from our regions. We need feedback from both regions and members on a regular basis. That's very important, because it involves supporting mid-level management." She intends to use the World Wide Web to "connect to the heart of what's going on in APPA and add value to the strategic plan by enhancing the ability of our regions and members to interact with the APPA office."

As she presented in her platform for President-Elect, key concerns for Kinnaman as she prepares to take on the APPA presidency include the association's evolving strategic plan and the Strategic Assessment Model (SAM). "My platform is as valid now as it was then," she said.

In terms of the strategic plan, "The Board of Directors is going to look at the strategic plan again," she said. "It will be a major piece on my plate. It was always intended to be a snapshot in time and reviewed periodically. We plan to coalesce the different documents into one cohesive whole. We'll look at all the existing documents, although the mission will not change—that's pretty sound. Some of the objectives may change due to the fact that we've made major strides in addressing several of those. The Board will look at the future of the facilities profession, where it's going, the future roles of facilities managers, and how to deal with driving forces within the profession."

In these efforts, "I will be guided by the work done by Bill Daigneau on the future of the association and the driving forces affecting our profession," she said. "We will coalesce where the profession is going with the plan for the association, because, to become the association of choice, we should respond to the profession itself. We must address information technology, scarce resources, social change, the role of government and environmental issues."

Kinnaman plans to get input on all aspects of the plan from APPA's seven regions, which are especially important to her as the segment of the association where she got her start in this aspect of professional leadership.

In terms of the Strategic Assessment Model, Kinnaman said this effort is vital to the continued strength of APPA and its profession. "Poor SAM has been four years in the making, but a newly identified task force now is hypercharged," she said. "I have dedicated half of my discretionary funds to this project and I hope for continued support so that we can conduct more sessions, roll it out for regional assessment and approval, and make it part of member services." She chairs the current SAM Task Force and contributed to the new APPA publication, The Strategic Assessment Model.

According to Kinnaman, "SAM looks at how we work with the plan. Typically, it has focused on education, association research, and recognition. We've always been strong in education, and we pack the house at every session of the APPA Institute for Facilities Management. Through SAM, we will further develop the Professional Leadership Academy, which has three tiers of skills development—individual, organizational, and professional," Kinnaman said.

SAM also will enhance APPA's research activities, she noted. "The concept behind SAM," Kinnaman said, "is to look at those performance indicators that reflect overall organizational effectiveness. SAM uses the Kaplan-Norton balanced scorecard framework to show how high-producing organizations look. SAM looks at an organization's strategy, finances, internal business processes, ability to learn and grow, and customer satisfaction—the major areas for gauging organizational effectiveness."

As APPA President, Kinnaman also intends to look at APPA's four core competencies in identifying specific performance indicators. Those four areas are general administration and management; operations and maintenance; energy and utilities; and planning, design, and construction. "We will be creating pars for the profession,' as in golf," she said. We envision 100+ organizations who will participate in a survey that will validate the levels of effectiveness over time. The model is a strategic tool that can be used by facilities administrators to initiate a benchmarking process. You can apply best practices toward improvement and do a better job of dealing with the realities of the profession. SAM will give APPA members a business tool to facilitate discussion with campus decision makers."

One of Kinnaman's great joys in APPA has been her involvement with the APPA Institute. "It has been thoroughly gratifying," she said. "I'd also like to get more involved with the Leadership Academy. These programs are typical of the wonderful opportunities offered by APPA for employees in facilities management."

Dealing with the Guys

Although she would like to see more members of her gender in the profession, being one of only a few women in education facilities management has not fazed Kinnaman much, due in great measure to her upbringing. "As the oldest of four children with three brothers, being in a male-dominated profession has not been a real transition for me," she said. "I got used to standing up for myself early. My philosophy always has been that excellence eventually bubbles to the top. And if women have to persevere a little longer and work a little harder, so be it."

To help improve the balance within the profession, Kinnaman would like to see a mentoring program for all. "Ironically, men in the association have said they need mentors, too," she noted. "I see them embracing diversity. I haven't had to deal with anyone in APPA as insensitive lugs, although we do need more mentoring to bring more women into the profession and the association." She urged other women interested in this field of work to "persevere, speak out, and be confident."

Looking to the Future

While her current focus is on the immediate future of her presidency, Kinnaman also is looking further ahead. She wants to promote APPA's vision to be the "association of choice and a global partner in learning," for the profession. To achieve such a lofty goal, she expects the association to make major progress on its list of initiatives. "Our initiatives have grown from 45 last fall to 110," she said. "These are significant pieces of work that will be major additions to the toolbox of skills that APPA brings to our members."

For the facilities management profession to be "up to snuff in the future," she said, "we will have to fulfill new roles. We've got to bring many resources to the table of higher education. I can see it on our own campus—our publics are urging us to become technologists, experts, and partners. We need to step up to the plate and embrace the opportunity. APPA can be immensely helpful by providing the networking, resources, and tools needed to cope with our evolving roles.

In terms of her own career, Kinnaman continues to be challenged in her current position as director. "The challenges are numerous in an environment that is ever-changing." She plans to "stay apprised of progress in APPA and shepherd SAM, the Institute and the Leadership Academy into the future even after her presidency. "I'd like to see the research and fellow activity of the Professional Leadership Center mature and present our members with the opportunity to contribute to the body of knowledge and give back to the facilities management profession.