President's Message

Jeff Feuquay

As those who attended know, the 1998 conference in Chicago was a resounding success. While not wishing to give short shrift to the other committee chairs, special thanks are due Ms. Jean Tozer, the Program Chair, and her committee who did the lion's share of the work in making it happen. Thanks are also due Ms. Renee Jones, the Host Chair, and her helpers for all the fine information about Chicago and for staffing the Host table at the conference. As with the past year's conference, Bill Waldron will soon have conference pictures on the ECN, the IPMAAC web site, designed to evoke nostalgia from attendees and envy from others. Yes, as the pictures will show, we had great attendance at the many excellent sessions, but the social events were also pretty fantastic -- including both the professional baseball game and the first (annual?) President's Ball. The support we receive from our parent organization was also very evident in how smoothly everything went and in the attendance of both the IPMA Executive Director and IPMA President at the conference.

The election results were announced at the business meeting: Kristine Smith is the 1999 President-Elect, and Mike Willihnganz and Beverly Waldron are new Board members. And, since Kristine's election will leave a vacancy on the Board, Ilene Gast has graciously accepted the Board's invitation to fill that unexpired term. Other important conference news included the announcement of Donna Denning, one of our own Board members, as this year's winner of the Bemis Award.

A number of goals and projects were in the works, and some significant successes were achieved. The Board has been seeking to expand IPMAAC's presence in the private sector, not to the detriment of our commitment to the public sector, but in an effort to emphasize the breadth of applicability of what our members do. We have also been seeking better ways to inform more of our traditional market that we exist. Some of our efforts have included the Program Committee's creation of a Call for Proposals that includes information about who we are and what we do, and much broader distribution of that Call and of our Conference Brochures -- last year we printed 3,000 brochures, this year 5,000. Bill Waldron's and his cohort's exhaustive efforts with the ECN, including both content and design, and extensive links between our site and others with related foci. Beverly Waldron has also dramatically enhanced IPMAAC's presence by the high-quality newsletter she produces and you're now reading. Past-president Paul Kaiser has assisted in this effort by developing proposed changes to our by-laws emphasizing that we are the personnel assessment group, regardless of the sector; those changes will be subject to a vote of the membership in the near future. We had limited success in our efforts to provide speakers to the IPMA Regional conferences, apparently largely due to scheduling issues.

As I said in my welcoming remarks in Chicago, my hope was that attendees would hear things they disagreed with, even things that annoyed them. Why? Because my underlying hope was and is that our Conference will be inspirational, will motivate our members to debate, to argue, to research, and to advance our profession. President-Elect David Dye will be sharing his strategic plan with you soon, his vision of what IPMAAC can be. Please read it, comment on it and work with your Board to improve our organization. I would appreciate it if those of you who attended the Chicago conference would write or e-mail me (jeff@feuquay.com) with your ideas on what was good and where we have opportunities for improvement. For those of you who missed, I also would appreciate your telling me if there is something we can change that would make the conference more attractive or more helpful.

Thank you for allowing me to serve in the role of President; I have thoroughly enjoyed having the opportunity to meet folks with whom I might not have crossed paths. As a final request: next year, as Past President, I serve as Chair of the Nominations Committee. I need help, both committee members and ideas on who to consider nominating for Board and President-Elect. Let me know.