2010 Owners Forum Professional Development Program

Owners Forum Session Schedule

Finally, a conference that "gets" it:

Owners drive the construction industry.

You are spending money and need results.

You are letting contracts and require performance.

You have people to please - taxpayers, bond investors, shareholders, bosses - and can't afford not to apply best practices.

Owners today urgently need to know what works and what doesn't...what the future holds...and how to get the most from their construction spending.

Now, at last, there's a high level professional conference that truly puts your needs and priorities in the spotlight.            

CMAA's first Owners Forum is new in all these ways:

• Panelists and presenters will be owners, selectively augmented with owner-invited service provider representatives.
• The program consists entirely of plenary sessions. No breakouts. No need to choose between competing sessions in the same time period. All Forum participants will experience the same program content.
• The agenda includes no "nuts and bolts" sessions on how to perform CM/PM. Instead, it stresses high level strategic business considerations.
• Special low registration fees for owners will make it possible to participate even on the tightest budget.

How will we know what matters most to owners?

We're asking them!

It's a simple, powerful idea.

To build a conference program that's absolutely current and tightly focused on what really counts, CMAA  is going right to the source.

Rather than pre-define session topics and recruit speakers to address them, we started by brainstorming with the CMAA Board of Directors, Professional Development Committee and staff, on two basic questions:

• Who are the most innovative, active and influential owners in the business? and
• How can we land them for our program?

Each owner on the Forum program will:

• Describe their organization's programs and plans related to capital construction
• Comments on their organizations Best Practices and innovations, successes and failures
• Share their views on the topics they consider most important, including:
• o Sustainability
• o BIM, electronic project management, and other emerging technologies
• o Integrated Project Delivery
• o CM/PM services and the best/worst things about CM providers
• o Project Delivery Methods: Options, comparisons, constraints
• o Human Capital Strategies: Outsourcing, staff augmentation, workforce development
• o ARRA and life after the stimulus: The future of funding
• o Plus whatever else is on the minds of these industry "influentials."

Add two multi-speaker Town Hall sessions, an opening session led by the CMAA College of Fellows, a high-profile keynote, and plenty of networking time, and the result is a program of unprecedented value.