Three decades of practitioner depth.
An independent firm built around senior facility management experience earned in the buildings, not just in the conference rooms.
What we do, and how we do it.
MacKnight Associates provides corporate, institutional, and government clients with strategic consulting in real estate, facility management, operations and maintenance, organizational design, and project and process management.
The approach is straightforward. We frame the question with the client, get to the answer, and stay close enough to the work to help it land. Most engagements draw on more than one service line. Most clients call us back.
The firm is deliberately small. The work is done by senior people, not handed down to junior staff. When an engagement needs more hands, we bring in collaboration partners with shared standards and a long track record together.
Diane MacKnight.
Phone: 703.801.2053
Email: [email protected]
LinkedIn: macknight-associates
Diane MacKnight founded MacKnight Associates to bring senior facility management counsel to clients facing the strategic and operational questions that come with running real estate at scale. The firm’s work has spanned Fortune 500 corporations, federal agencies, leading universities, and major nonprofits.
Her experience spans three sides of the industry. She has been a practitioner inside operating facility organizations, a leader on the service-provider side, and an educator working with academic and certification programs. That triangulation shapes how she frames problems. Most consultants speak fluently from one of those three vantage points; she has worked from all three.
Diane is a Fellow of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) and a Fellow of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). She is a past Chair of IFMA, the discipline’s largest professional body. Her work in industry leadership has included moderating the RICS Summit of the Americas panel on the future of corporate solutions and facilities, and active service across IFMA’s councils and committees.
She works directly with each client. Engagements are conducted by senior people, not delegated to junior staff.
Senior people on the work.
Engagements are staffed by experienced practitioners, not handed down to junior associates.
Anne is a Consultant with MacKnight Associates. Her primary expertise is in facility management organizational analysis and process improvement — operations and maintenance planning, sustainability audits, staffing assessments, and FM technology reviews. Her client work spans the Smithsonian Institution, the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission, Lake County (Illinois), the City of Winston-Salem (North Carolina), Texas A&M University, the World Bank, and Mecklenburg County (North Carolina). She also developed a fundamentals course for entry-level facility managers and the Certified Facility Manager Exam Review Course for IFMA.
Anne has served on the Programs Committee for IFMA’s Greater Phoenix Chapter and as Programs Chair for the Capital Chapter, and has worked on initiatives to engage the next generation of facility management professionals. She was one of the youngest professionals to earn the Certified Facility Manager (CFM) credential and was among the first recipients of the Facility Management Professional (FMP) designation. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Facilities Management from Brigham Young University.
Larry brings a rare combination of practical operating-engineering background and more than 30 years of hands-on operational experience across health care, museums, hospitals, and corporate headquarters. He has extensive commissioning and start-up experience and exceptional diagnostic skills.
Larry offers clients significant value in building operations, performance metrics, critical-facilities operations, operating procedures, direct digital controls, building automation systems, and employee skills assessment.
A trusted network, brought in when the work calls for it.
When an engagement needs more hands or specialized depth, MacKnight Associates brings in long-standing collaboration partners who share its standards and senior-only approach.
Michael Redding and Diane MacKnight have collaborated for more than two decades. Michael’s first assignment as a facility management advisor was supporting Diane at Gannett / USA Today in 1999. The two have worked together since the founding of Agile OAK in 2008, on more than 120 assignments.
Michael is Managing Director of Agile OAK LLC and a former Director of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA) Global Board, where he provided governance oversight to the 23,000-member global professional organization.
Before founding Agile OAK in 2008, Michael had 10 years of senior real estate and facility management advisory experience, developing methodologies for workplace and FM assessments, organizational design, vendor optimization, outsourcing, performance management, and best-practice implementation.
Michael has authored numerous articles and white papers on topics of interest to senior-level facilities management and real estate executives. He has been published in IFMA’s Real Estate & Facility Management Journal and numerous other domestic and international publications, and is co-author of the BOMI online training course “Talking with the C-Suite.”
His advisory experience reflects the industry’s globalization, with engagements completed in North America, Europe, the Middle East, China, and Brazil.
How Engagements Work
Frame the question
We start by getting clear on what the actual question is. Often the question the client opens with is not the question that matters most.
Get to the answer
Diagnostic work, interviews, site walks, document review, benchmarking. We develop a defensible answer, not just an opinion.
Help it land
Recommendations alone don’t change a facility organization. We stay close enough to the work to support implementation and the early operating decisions.
Step back when ready
The goal is for the client organization to own the new operating pattern. We end the engagement when the client is running on the new pattern without us.