Tony Keane, IFMA President with Alana Dunoff, IFMA Fellow, 2014
Alana Dunoff, IFMA Fellow 2014, with Tony Keane, IFMA President
Alana Dunoff never wants to feel left out, but once she was not serving on the IFMA Board of Directors, she did feel left out even though she was a new mother, also focused on work, teaching, and home-life. She relished her IFMA experiences, so she got involved again at the grassroots level in her Philadelphia chapter. Her contributions are recognized, and she was named an IFMA Fellow at World Workplace 2014, having served as president of the Greater Philadelphia Chapter as well as on the Board of Directors of IFMA. In 2013, she was honored as IFMA’s Distinguished Member of the Year.
Since 2011, she has been adjunct associate professor in the B.S. in the Facility Management Program at Temple University where she teaches Research Methods for FMs and the FM Capstone Class. Dunoff has made it her mission to get students involved with IFMA. That too paid off, as three of her students received scholarships of $5000, $3000, and $2500 from the IFMA Foundation at World Workplace 2014.
Dunoff herself was a 1991 IFMA DuPont scholarship winner. She completed her Master of Science at Cornell University in Facility Planning & Management in 1992 and was offered her first job at an IFMA Philadelphia chapter meeting. While employed as a space planner at Jefferson University Hospital, she worked on every committee she could in the Philadelphia chapter, becoming its President in 2001.
Among her career experiences was healthcare master planning with Pesce Associates, when hospitals were merging. “Going to cities all over and thinking of strategies to unite hospitals was challenging work,” says Dunoff. “I enjoyed being in healthcare and seeing how I could make an impact on patient care.” But she also was concerned about being pigeon-holed as a healthcare services design specialist. Getting hired in 1998 as a project manager with Little Diversified Architectural Services to work with huge corporate banks saved her from that, and she was eventually promoted to design principal managing ten design professionals in the corporate interiors department; responsible for business development, project management and successful project completion. Dunoff credits her project management, organization, and process skills as the keys that made her an asset to Little whose Philadelphia offices closed in 2002.
Finding herself surprisingly unemployed, Dunoff ventured to World Workplace Toronto in 2002. She quickly found a programming project for a law firm and that lead to begin her strategic facility consultancy, AFD Facility Planning.
A year later at Moore College of Art & Design, she started teaching in the Interior Design program with Environmental Theory and Programming. “I wanted to teach the real world of project management to interior designers and to demonstrate that spaces change after design,” Dunoff quips. She taught one class a semester for eight years. “I loved it! I knew I was making an impact on how they think and plan space.”
In 2005, she helped the Community College of Philadelphia create its Associate’s Program in Facilities Management and then in 2009 channeled her efforts toward creating a BS program at Temple University. Fortunately, she has known steady work, clients, and projects to build her consulting practice that encompasses strategic FM programming, pre-design, move management, furniture spec, development, sustainability, data metrics, evaluation of new work orders, and management plans. All this while still serving her beloved Philadelphia IFMA chapter as liaison between academic programs and student engagement, and raising two daughters with her husband, Glenn.
“All of my clients in the past 11 years have come from my networking within IFMA,” declares Dunoff. “IFMA embraced me so I could go forward; and I am a unique resource in the Philadelphia community.”
Dunoff also is a qualified instructor for the IFMA credential, the Facilities Management Professional (FMP). She just taught 81 students the FMP course at Villanova University Dept. of Continuing Education, and she has three clients that want her to provide FMP instruction for their staff.
Now a Fellow, she joins the “visionaries”
“When I joined IFMA there were these larger than life visionaries creating a profession that was uniquely the right fit. I was in awe of what they were doing and what they had done,” says Dunoff. “To be considered in their realm is an honor. I now know others see me in that realm as the “masters” and “visionaries.” We are going to do something and create something that is bigger than all of us.”
“I love this profession and love what I do. Facilities management draws people who care about people, people who volunteer,” gushes Dunoff. “We cross over, care deeply, and lend a hand. In the same vein, IFMA is people-centric, and I am so proud of being involved in IFMA.”