By Renee Hoekstra, CVS – President, SAVE International
September is upon us, and for many of you that means children are heading back to school. In the United States we are celebrating Labor Day which is a public holiday celebrated on the first Monday in September. It honors the American labor movement and the contributions that workers have made to the development, growth, endurance, strength, security, prosperity, productivity, laws, sustainability, persistence, structure and well-being of the country. If you think about it, SAVE International promotes many of these attributes and the Value Methodology helps organizations to accomplish many of the others.
As mentioned in last month’s President’s message, many of our SAVE members have taken some time off and I am no different; we took several days off and spent some time in Alaska for a summer vacation. Hopefully you all remember that each of us needs to have time to rest, relax and to reboot (the three Rs). Taking some quality time off helps us physically and emotionally maintain a healthy balance between work and home.
I wanted to thank all of our board members and members at large who have volunteered to review the various chapters for the VMBoK. As I had mentioned in the last article, this has been a large commitment for everyone, but I think SAVE and our members are going to benefit from all of these efforts. We are also beginning to think about developing a marketing plan for the VMBoK to start Spreading the Word to professional organizations, government stakeholders and private companies. This effort will help provide that professional structure that SAVE needs to help others realize that we are the go-to organization for Value. We are in need of some contacts for organizations that you believe would benefit from these efforts. Please reach out to the SAVE business office at info@value-eng.org and provide any information you have that can help us. These are exciting times!
Planning for our 2020 Value Summit has already started. The planning committee is working diligently to make the 2020 event even better than 2019. Call for papers will be coming out soon so please pay close attention as there will be changes this year to help us to continue to improve our approach to helping our members obtain their necessary certification PDUs. Speaking of conferences, our various affiliate value societies are sponsoring other conferences around the globe this Fall. I’m sure they would love to see many of you attend. Here is the list of what’s coming up:
- Society of Korean Value Engineers (SKVE) – November 2, 2019 in Busan, Korea
- Society of Japanese Value Engineering (SJVE) – November 6-7, 2019 in Tokyo, Japan
- The 9th annual Asian conference sponsored by the Indian Value Engineering Society (INVEST) – November 15-16, 2019 in Bangalore, India
More information about these conferences and other events can be found in the Calendar of Events on the SAVE website.
As summer begins to wind down, we are getting closer to those fabulous fall temperatures and the SAVE board is getting geared up and preparing for our October board meeting. We only have a chance to get together three times a year and we have much to discuss. We will be updating our Strategic Plan and really trying to focus on those things that will help us to continue to grow the methodology and our society.
As I do with every article, I am reaching out to all of you to volunteer to help build our organization on the local level with your Chapters. This includes reaching out and engaging with others to invite them to local meetings and co-sponsoring meetings with other professional organizations to introduce people to the value methodology and SAVE.
The Arizona Chapter had another great success with their local Arizona Chapter of the American Public Works Association. They taught a 4-hour ABCs of VE course with over 30 participants and then worked a complimentary SAVE booth throughout their annual conference. If each Chapter could do something similar, think about the number of people we could introduce to SAVE’s vision of VALUE. It would go a long way in helping to Spread the Word. We need your help and commitment – join the movement!
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