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Committee Meetings at Atlanta

By Mr. Gary Schatz P.E., PTOE, PTP posted 08-14-2012 12:12 PM

  
Hi all!  Just some quick thoughts from my participation in the committee meetings I attended at Atlanta.

A common theme I heard in the TRB Roundabout Committee (yes they are one now as of last May!), the ITE Roundabout Committee, from ITE staff, and TENC is that there is a lot on everyone's plate in terms of broadness of topics in need of consideration.  There is also an enhanced emphasis on follow through and delivery of commitments timely.  Now, as we are a community of volunteers, we need to balance folks' availability with meeting the needs of our profession, thus we acknowledge that it is better to focus on a few topics and be successful instead trying to get everything done at once or allowing projects to linger for too long.  Like was said during the opening plenary session, we may need to be satisfied with a 70% solution implemented timely and then adjusted with applied good judgement going forward as opposed to waiting for the 100% solution before doing anything.

To help our committee with this, we will be revising our current action plan in the next couple of months to better define goals and objectives in terms of the messages heard this week.  This will also include better defining areas of individual responsibilities and developing a variety of sub-committees to help move various issues forward.  Our goal is to engage our members more broadly with specific but smaller "bite-sized" tasks and assignments which spreads the load and better manages expectations.

The week has been a great learning opportunity for me.  Becoming more aware of the roles and responsibilities of the various ITE/TRB committees is immensely helpful, but more importantly having an opportunity to visit one-on-one helps me to better understand expectations and viewpoints.  I do want to encourage all of you to let me know immediately if there are any issues, concerns, suggestions, or comments that are important to you and that you feel I should know.  My contact info is up to date and a quick phone call is always welcomed and appreciated. (Email can sometimes be a poor communications media....)

As always, thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you.

Gary
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