By Michael Pearsall, P.Eng., CVS, FEC – Vice President / President-Elect, SAVE International and Tammy Dow, CVS – Director, Conferences, SAVE International
We are definitely living through an unprecedented time. For the first time in 70 years, SAVE International found our annual Value Summit suddenly a health and safety risk. Therefore, we held our first ever virtual Value Summit from June 8-10, 2020.
We are very happy to report that the success of our first virtual Value Summit has exceeded our expectations. A virtual Value Summit does come with the challenge of finding a time slot that is desirable to all members across the globe. Even with this challenge, there were 272 attendees from 22 countries. WOW! That is truly amazing. Thank you to all of our members for attending, especially those who attended in the late evening/middle of the night or really early in the morning. This illustrates the level of commitment our members have to sharing our methodology.
We started off with an inspiring opening plenary message from SAVE’s President, Renee Hoekstra, followed Monday by a quality track of papers focused on Transportation. Many thanks are owed to Mark Gabel for organizing the bulk of the Monday presentations. Tuesday and Wednesday followed up with more excellent presentations on different core competencies from around the world.
The quality of all of the presentations was excellent and we thank all of the speakers for their efforts and the time put into helping us put on a quality event.
Monday night we had some fun with our first virtual President’s Reception “It’s 5 O’clock Somewhere”. It was great to see and interact with everyone online, be it briefly. Similarly, we had some excellent chats during the twice-daily breakouts.
New features this year included Continuing Education sessions. These sessions were added to focus on specific skill development that all practitioners could enjoy. We were honoured to have a respected member and Past President conduct the first of these new sessions. Laurie Dennis gave us all an excellent primer on Value Management report format and writing. On Tuesday we were able to enjoy an information-packed Continuing Education session on Cost Analysis from Greg Brink and Alex Manion, and on Wednesday Thomas Cook and Jay Bytheway closed out the whole event with an engaging Continuing Education session on Transforming Information.
We recorded all of the sessions and are now working on options for rebroadcasting – stay-tuned for an exciting announcement about this later in the summer.
None of this would have been possible without a strong group of volunteers. When we knew we had to cancel the hotel contract and move to a virtual platform there was only about six weeks of planning time and the Planning Committee all rallied together to split up the tasks. We can’t go into specifics on everyone’s role; however, we want to thank them all profusely for stepping up and making this happen. A special shout-out to new SAVE Board member Javier Masini who wasn’t on the committee but stepped forward and volunteered to run GoToWebinar in the background for the entire event. Javier also spent many long days in advance setting up all of the pre-recorded content.
The Planning Committee is currently reviewing all of the feedback that we received from the virtual Summit and developing lessons learned. We are also looking into options for future rebroadcasting possibilities as well as future virtual events. Stay tuned for future updates.
Looking forward to seeing you all at the 2021 Value Summit at the Renaissance Phoenix Glendale Hotel & Spa in Glendale, Arizona.
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