By Renee Hoekstra, CVS – President, SAVE International
We’re a quarter way through the year already and still so much to do! I hope everyone has had a great beginning to 2020. I know that things are really busy out there, but I want to remind everyone that as a volunteer organization we still need some of your time. A mentioned, we have our Tiger Teams off and running and I can’t wait to hear from them on how things are going – and more importantly, what the SAVE International Board can do to support their outcomes. I am excited about both teams.
We are all busy on current initiatives and planning for the 2020 Value Summit which will be held this June 6-10 in New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. Please plan on joining us and taking advantage of a great opportunity to network and earn your certification maintenance PDUs as well as expand your capabilities.
Speaking of which, many of you should have received your maintenance notification for your VMA or CVS certification. Make sure you get the affidavit and your payment submitted so as not to impact your certification. The SAVE Certification Board has worked very hard to make this process as painless as possible and I think they have done a great job. Thanks, team, for all the efforts you put in to make this happen.
Do make sure you keep track of all your PDUs though, as audits will occur. You may receive a notice requesting the information that you have claimed so make sure you keep your maintenance workbook up to date so that you are not scrambling when the audit request occurs.
Those of you who know me know that I want to always ask the question, are we doing everything we can do be the best that we can be as an organization? I was speaking with one of our government members the other day and we were having a very rousing discussion about Value Engineering (VE) as a process and the ability for VE to be agile and flexible in its use and application. This reminded me of something that had occurred in the construction industry quite a few years ago. When a national organization refused to embrace a new approach and, instead of being the leader in this application, another organization was formed to take the lead and so they missed out on an opportunity to be in an innovator versus a laggard. I would ask you all, is the Value Methodology (VM) having some of the same challenges?
Several years ago, LEAN showed up on the horizon, and now Agile and Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) are showing up around the world. Do we need to look at ourselves and make sure their inception has not been due to our inability to meet our customers’ requests? For example, this individual had mentioned that our world is changing with different needs that can be supported on-line, the cloud and many other collaborative types of tools. His comment was if VM is not agile enough to meet the needs of owners, they may be turning to other types of processes, as mentioned above, that will give them what they need. I would tell you the first time I heard a presentation on IPD, I really got incensed. This tool is really a combination of Partnering, which has been around since the late 1980s, and VE with a couple of other tweaks such as signed contracts between stakeholders. But it is not using our phased job plan and it is not required to happen in a minimum amount of days. I would ask you to ask yourselves, why did someone feel a need to change the two terms to IPD? Did our industry not know about these needs and try and help to fill the need or did we just say, “No it is not the VM unless you go through all six phases”? These are just a couple of questions that I pose to our membership.
We have talked about developing and supporting Value Enhancing Methods (VEMs) and I believe this is a great opportunity for SAVE. Let’s continue to look into the future and see how SAVE can better align ourselves to become the organization that others turn to for all tools related to improving projects, processes and products. I would love to hear from our membership if there are tools that we should begin to embrace and make a part of our overall value approach. Let’s stay on the leading edge.
In closing, things seem to be crazy out there right now. Between how busy everyone seems to be and now with the worry of health issues, especially with many of us that spend so much time on airplanes, I would just like to express my concern for all of our members and hope that you will stay well and safe in all your travels. We have several international conferences coming up as well as our 2020 Value Summit. We hope that you can engage and network with our peers; however, we may need to be a little more creative to make this happen with the challenges we are facing today.
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