President’s Report

The ASFE president’s final act in office is preparation of an annual report that discusses highlights of the ASFE year. Here follows the report prepared by ASFE President 2010-11 James W. “Jay” Martin, P.E. (AMEC Earth and Environmental, Inc.).

Serving as president of any major organization is an honor few professionals are fortunate enough to enjoy. Serving as president of ASFE is an extraordinary honor, because the organization itself is extraordinary. Compared to many of the organizations we associate with – ASCE, ACEC, and the like – we’re not very big. But in terms of our ability to innovate; to make meaningful change happen; to get things done extremely well, fast – we just may be the biggest of all. And we do that thanks to a dedicated pool of talented volunteers and a willing staff always ready to roll up their sleeves. I’ve seen what they’ve gotten done during the 20 years I’ve been involved with ASFE, and I’ve always been impressed.

The purpose of this annual President’s Report is to update the membership on our progress this past year and, in particular, the status of our three-year strategic plan. We’re now two years into our plan and, despite the economy, we’re on schedule. We have embraced the new purpose, completed the realignment of the organization, and, as outlined below, made significant advancements with our allied and client organizations and the implementation of key membership initiatives. Through the hard work of our committees, led by the Program Committee, we have had two very successful meetings with programs focused on our new purpose.

Let me recap what ASFE has done for you lately, starting with materials. In reading about them, be mindful of how we’ve expanded our scope. Ten years ago, I would have been listing new risk-management items. Now, in addition to those, I’m relating a list of materials designed to help firms and the individuals who comprise them serve as trusted professional advisors; the kind of individuals no intelligent client would even dream of marginalizing or commoditizing. As always, work progresses at a fever pitch, as we develop continually more effective programs, services, and materials for our members and for all geoprofessionals and the professions they serve.

Much of the new “stuff” has been developed by or with the assistance of our newly constituted Education Committee, which has taken the bull by the horns to survey our members to learn their preferences for educational materials, and then create an entirely new way of getting those materials refined and produced. The Committee has also taken on the task of reviewing everything we have, to identify what’s still good as is and what needs updating. The Committee also made time to develop three new Lunch & Learn presentations, on workplace harassment, scope development, and professional ethics. Then, working with the Geotechnical Committee – one of our three new practice committees – it produced ASFE’s Professional Ethics, a three-part, three-hour ethics presentation originally created about a decade ago. ASFE Practice Alert 49: Ten Things You Need To Know about Client Representatives was also the doing of this committee.

As for updating key items, this year we issued our newest edition of Recommended Practices for Design Professionals Engaged as Experts in the Resolution of Construction Industry Disputes. This is a document we conceived as a means principally to overcome the biased testimony of hired-gun experts, and it works. We now have 42 endorsers of this document: ASCE, ACEC, NSPE, AIA, ASME, ASHRAE, APWA, and many more. In fact, to the best of our knowledge, no construction-industry position statement has received more endorsements than this one, offering further proof that ASFE has charted more new association-service territory than any other organization serving our industry and our professions.

Our extraordinary Limitation of Liability Case Index and Economic Loss Doctrine Bibliography have both been updated, thanks to Skellenger Bender and the Legal Affairs Committee. The Legal Affairs Committee has also provided guidance on amicus briefs we need to become involved with, at the same time expanding ASFE’s outreach to other, like-minded organizations. The CoMET Committee has been active, too, making ASFE the organization for CoMET consultants. Now, you can enter “CoMET” into our website’s search field and locate dozens of relevant programs and materials. The Committee is also putting the wraps on three new message brochures and an updated Important Information… report insert.

We’ve also been successful in bringing in new materials from other sources. Thanks to the Environmental Committee, we’ve added 27 new guides and texts about environmental issues, as well as four new publications focused solely on brownfields.

The New Leaders’ Committee worked with the Education Committee to launch our first-ever webinar, which was a stunning success. Our goal is to do at least four webinars in the year ahead, with one of them led by the New Leaders’ Committee, addressed to the younger professionals of our member firms’ staffs, telling what they need to do to get ahead. And because the New Leaders’ Committee has been so effective, we’re going to recreate it. The original chair – Joel Carson – is this year moving up to the Board, and all the other members of that committee now have key roles on other committees. They are contributing new knowledge, new outlooks, and new energy. Their key task this year: Find replacements. Our future needs them.

In terms of programming, Peer Review had another good year, with our newly created Peer Review Task Force focusing on making the program even more robust as we move ahead. We also had another well-enrolled Fundamentals of Professional Practice, with survey results showing what we already know: It’s an extraordinary program that garners extraordinary results.

And speaking of surveys: The Business Practice Committee continues to keep us informed with its annual Financial Performance Survey and its Industry Snapshots, giving us a reading on the industry’s pulse. The Membership Committee is behind some important surveys, too, including its effort to track members’ attitudes about our progress as well as data that comprise our critical success indicators.

As for getting our message out to allied and client groups, our External Relations Committee has been extremely busy. It developed the all-new geoprofessional value proposition that will be an essential guide as we move forward establishing new relationships with allied organizations as well as organizations that comprise clients and those who influence clients’ decisions. Our Membership Committee has also done a great job in that respect, developing new categories of associate membership that enable ASFE to encompass ever-more geoprofessional diversity: Collaborative Members, comprising geoconstructors with or without in-house design capabilities; Government Members; and Student Members. Doing so has necessitated a modification of our bylaws, development of new membership recruitment materials, and a significant, behind-the-scenes website overhaul that staff has almost completed. We’ve also created some new policies and procedures to encourage meeting attendance by Faculty and Student Members, as well as younger members of local Member Firms’ staffs. Last year we overhauled our long-standing meeting format and this year we’ve added the concept of meeting sponsorship, to add more value and interest to meeting attendance. And how we choose our meeting sites, and the kinds of materials we distribute at meetings, have changed and will continue to change, thanks to our new focus on sustainability, articulated so well for us in the sustainability statement crafted by the Emerging Issues and Trends Committee.

And now, to expand our outreach, we’re going to other groups’ meetings, and not just as onlookers. The External Relations Committee this year created the new ASFE exhibit booth that we launched at GeoFrontiers and, with the Environmental Committee, at the Brownfields Conference in Philadelphia. We can also thank the External Relations Committee for the creation of new collaterals to help us make our presence better known. A major element of that effort is now evident on Wikipedia where, for the first time, we have a comprehensive definition of the geoprofessions. The Committee has also identified the most important allies and most important client groups to target, and is considering the concept of developing a geoprofessional organizations coalition whose members would all contribute to efforts designed to maximize the geoprofessions’ importance and value to the marketplace. In unity we will find the strength we need; the External Relations Committee is working to make it happen.

Our CoMET Committee has been engaging in outreach, too, with articles aimed at client representatives and client influencers, upcoming in Sustainable Facility and Environmental Building and Design. It’s reaching out to others, too, by becoming involved in the growing efforts to subject CoMET field representatives to state prevailing-wage rules.

The Geotechnical Committee is also working on outreach, developing a PowerPoint presentation template firms can apply to develop their own unique messages about the value they provide. Our other practice committees will be following suit. And of course, we are using our columns in CE News and GeoStrata to beat the drum for our cause and our organization, and we’re doing the same with other articles in other magazines.

All told, saying that this has been an exciting year filled with progress is an understatement, thanks to the hard work of a dedicated crew of volunteers, focused on making things better for us all. Of course, we’re ASFE, so we’re impatient. We want the difficult things done now and the impossible things done two days from now. That’s not going to happen unless we can go beyond volunteered efforts alone. To change the outlooks, attitudes, and actions of those who make the marketplace what it is, we’ll need more person-to-person outreach time than volunteers can afford to donate, and we’ll need to provide more assistance to volunteers so they can focus on those tasks where having volunteers involved can maximize results. To that end, we have developed a Director of Outreach position; we expect to have an individual onboard before the end of the second quarter. We’ll also need to advertise and engage in more high-level PR. And to sustain our outreach activities we’ll need more members to give us more volunteers; a louder voice; and more revenue from dues…the long-term resources we need to succeed. To help jump start our outreach activities, we are building a Foundation for the Future, by encouraging all ASFE members to provide four years’ worth of dues over the next three years. We will use those funds for outreach activities only, and manage the expenses involved and the income they generate separate from our operating budget. We are confident the funds raised will allow us to make tremendous progress over the next three years, which is exactly what we will be planning to do when this summer rolls around, and the Board meets to once again develop a three-year strategic plan.

This has been a great year. I am privileged to have been involved. I look forward to next year, with David Gaboury at the helm, and to many more years after that. You are the people who have made ASFE great. With your help, we will accomplish what needs to get done to help the geoprofessions and geoprofessionals ascend to their rightful positions in the markets they serve.

Thank you for this opportunity.

James W. “Jay” Martin, P.E.
President 2010-2011
ASFE/The Geoprofessional Business Association