By Katherine Bethany – President, SAVE International
It has been a busy month for the SAVE International Board of Directors and Certification Board. Both boards met (overlapping) in Phoenix, AZ in early January. It is heartening to see how dedicated both boards are to the Society and to making sure that the Value Methodology is a well understood, accurately applied, and important process that can improve projects, processes and products.
As Value Professionals, I know you understand identifying needed changes, developing implementation strategies, and then actually implementing the changes is not easy. From my perspective, the easy part is the creativity part of the process – “we should do _____”. What is more difficult is deciding which of the “we should dos” to actually implement, and the most challenging part is the actual implementation.
Well, both boards are right in the middle of the process of implementing some much-required changes. The SAVE Certification Board is working very hard to get the changes to the certification process up and running. You will see more information on this in other Value World articles, via email and on the SAVE website.
The SAVE Board and business office are tackling a much-needed clean-up of our governing documents (Constitution, Bylaws and Standard Operating Procedures.) The current governing documents are in direct conflict with each other and do not allow for flexibility over time. The SAVE Board worked up a strategy to combine/simplify the documents and also to simplify the structure of the Board of Directors. Once we have the documents drafted, we will be asking our membership to vote on the proposed changes.
In general, the changes we are going to propose will make the SAVE Board operate like most non-profit/professional society boards currently operate. We are proposing doing away with electing board members to specific jobs (such as VP Marketing) and instead will elect future board members as “Director”, and at the first board meeting of the new term the Board of Directors will divide up the work among the various Directors and form “committees” under the Directors to complete tasks. This should give future boards more flexibility to assign directors to critical tasks and functions. The exception to this will be the positions of President, Vice President and the Treasurer/Secretary – these will continue to be elected.
I hope these pending changes will make more sense to you as we roll out the details in the coming weeks.
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