By Mike Pearsall, P.Eng., CVS, CVM, FICE, FEC
Welcome to a new feature of Value World!
I would like to start off by acknowledging our President’s message in the last issue. Being a career transportation professional myself and a VE enthusiast/practitioner, I was saddened last year when I learned of the demise of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) VE Technical Committee. Officially, AASHTO has made the decision to fold the Technical Committee on Value Engineering into the new Technical Committee on Project Management along with the former Technical Committee on Preconstruction Engineering Management. What that means for us though is potentially a loss of one of the strongest connections in transportation VE.
While AASHTO has a big influence over my daily life, I have long-since gotten over trying to change what they do because I am (gasp) a Canadian. Now before you jump to conclusions, I’m not a lumberjack, I don’t live in an igloo and I definitely don’t own a dogsled. I speak English (and a little bit of French). I like hockey, but I am far from a super-star and my life does not revolve around it. I may occasionally speak a little different from some of you and we could argue who has the accent. However, I think we can both agree the band is “ZeeZee” Top, but I think “Zed” 28 is a far better muscle car name than a “Zee” 28. Seriously speaking, all this really means for AASHTO is that someone like myself or my good friend SteVE can never be anything more than a non-voting associate member, but that’s OK as it is all we need to share information back and forth.
To be honest, I can completely understand what AASHTO has done from the aspect of trying to reduce the overall number of Technical Committees down to a more manageable level. All large organizations do this exercise from time to time and just as it makes perfect sense to take a second fresh look at any project with a VE study, it also makes sense to re-evaluate your committee structure on a regular basis and look for efficiencies. I’m sure we could all also make a strong argument for VE being a skill all successful project managers need in their tool kit and this may have influenced where things have landed at AASHTO. What is more important is the opportunity that this has opened up for a broader discussion.
Now back to sharing. That is exactly what this new section of Value World is all about – more specifically, the function “Share Information” primarily and a secondary function of “Connect Practitioners”. While I welcome and strongly encourage all of the AASHTO VE people to share information here, I would also like to acknowledge that transportation is about so much more globally than highways and bridges. Though I deal primarily with highways myself, I made it clear to SAVE International President, Mary Ann Lewis, when I agreed to get this section of Value World rolling, that it has to be about more than just AASHTO. I have heard some excellent transit case studies from Korea and last year in Niagara Falls we heard about value in the Dutch Coast Guard. I would like to share those stories and experiences here as well. I would also like to hear from our fellow Department of Transportation (DOT) and Ministry of Transportation (MOT) staff and practitioners what sort of stories and information we could share in this space to help us better connect with you and help to better connect the transportation VE world to SAVE.
In the next issue, I am going to provide an overview of the successful Value Engineering program at the Ministry of Transportation in Ontario, Canada. In the interim, I would encourage any transportation professional out there who would like to share their stories to contact me at mike.pearsall@ontario.ca.
About Mike Pearsall
Since this is the first of hopefully a series and not all of you know me, I should close with a bit about myself. I started working for the Ministry of Transportation Ontario (MTO) as a student and have continued to work there for the quarter century since I graduated from university. My career has mainly been involved with the planning, design, construction and maintenance of highways. I have held various positions at the Ministry of Transportation in Regional Offices and Head Office and am currently the Head of the Design Standards Section for the province. More importantly I have been actively involved with Value Engineering with the ministry since December 1996. I have been active with the board of Value Analysis Canada for about 15 years now and I currently serve as the Past-President. As far as SAVE is concerned, I went to my first SAVE conference in 2000, where I also attended my Module II training with a memorable group including some now past SAVE executives. Most recently I co-chaired the joint VAC/SAVE conference last year in Niagara Falls.
Oh, and before I forget. While you are reading this, you may be sitting in your living room. I will tell you that a chesterfield can be found there and I think it has the function of “support load” (and hopefully that load is still awake at this point!).
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