By Michael Pearsall, P.Eng., CVS, CVM, FEC – Vice President/President-Elect, SAVE International
Wow, what a great Value Summit this year in Portland! Many thanks to the dedicated SAVE International 2019 Value Summit planning committee and members of the SAVE Cascadia Chapter for all of their help to make this a success. Thank you to all of the attendees for sharing some laughs with me as I tried to inject some fun while keeping the event professional. I think I am still working off all the sugar from the VooDoo Doughnuts I ate!
Registration was strong this year with over 254 people registered from 20 different countries. What is even more exciting is that over 80 people were first-time attendees!
I was also very happy to see that for the first time in a number of years all of the planned pre- and post-Summit training opportunities were offered as planned as we had sufficient pre-registration.
Everyone should have been able to learn something new and get their required PDUs from the three concurrent tracks that were running. As usual I tried to stick my head in and take a quick count on attendance in the various tracks at the start of each session and typically each track had 40 to 100 people in the room at any given time.
One of the benefits of being the SAVE Director of Conferences is that I have the opportunity to read and re-read all of the submitted papers a few times in advance of the Value Summit. While I could not be in all of the tracks at the same time to hear all of the presentations I wanted to hear, I was rewarded by many great presentations which I had been looking forward to hearing. Every year I am pleased to see new things and unique aspects of the Value Methodology and its application.
I would like to give a special shout-out to Mark Gabel of Washington DOT, who volunteered to organize the Transportation Track and did a spectacular job in his first year. Thankfully Mark has agreed to take on the challenge again for 2020, so if you enjoyed that particular track you can plan on enjoying a similarly good offering in New Orleans.
I would be remis if I didn’t once again thank all of our speakers and moderators. As I have said many times a successful Value Summit relies on good speakers and competent moderators.
I hope everyone enjoyed our inaugural Casino night. I think it ran well for our first year of trying it. I have a few good suggestions on how to improve it for the future, but all in all I thought it was a fun way to end things and congratulations again to our prize winners.
This year we introduced a new way to self-track your PDUs for Summit attendance thanks to the assistance of RHA in setting up a QR code system. I know the new system wasn’t without its flaws in the initial stages and I appreciate the perseverance of all to gather your codes. We will continue to work on this system for next year. If anyone wants to get a record of your PDU tracking for 2019 a link will be available shortly after we finish cleaning up the data.
Click here to view the photos from the 2019 Value Summit.
As I formally hand the Summit planning reins over to Tammy Dow’s very capable hands, I am pleased to report that many of the volunteers on our enthusiastic and dedicated 2019 Value Summit planning committee have agreed to continue on with planning the 2020 Value Summit. In addition, we have a couple of new volunteers from the New Orleans area joining us.
Sponsorship is very important – without it, we cannot have a quality event at a reasonable cost. I am very thankful for those sponsors who stepped up and supported the 2019 Value Summit: Strategic Value Solutions, Value Management Strategies, Benesch, RHA, Bolton Value Consulting, Society of Korean Value Management, GOAL/QPC, SAVE Cascadia Chapter, and SAVE Paul Revere Chapter.
For those of you who are wondering about my wife’s well-being, I am pleased to report that by the time I made it back from Portland she was able to go back to work. She has had a number of physio-therapy treatments and says she is almost back to normal.
Once again, I was really happy to see everyone and already I am looking forward to seeing all my old friends and a few new ones next year in New Orleans.
Please plan on being in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA June 6-9, 2020 for the 2020 Value Summit!
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