National IGE Report: July-August 2024

At the 2024 JETC in Orlando, Fla., the Society continued to advance its cornerstone mission of leading collaboration across the A/E/C profession.

The event served as a prime opportunity for more than 2,700 attendees to engage in discussions, listening sessions, roundtables, and other joint opportunities to address the many challenges confronting the national engineering sector.

Updates on Progress

During the week, a mixture of SAME’s National IGE Projects and other ongoing industry-government engagement efforts presented updates on their progress. Participants had the chance to hear directly from team leads about accomplishments to date and the plans moving forward.

IGE Roundtable: Planning Through Design, Parts 1 & 2. During the first two days of JETC, participants continued discussions as part of a recently developed IGE initiative on federal planning and project design borne out of the Tri-Services IGE Workshop in Europe (held in February 2024). To open the floor, participants were challenged with a problem statement of how to be more efficient and effective within the European Theater, and what does success look like in terms of outcomes. Discussions quickly took off with a focus on timelines. Using Chatham House rules and Pomodoro-timed brainstorming techniques, participants engaged in an involved, dynamic, and robust dialogue that covered developing and meeting realistic timelines with practical design and planning objectives. The end goal: improve operational readiness and mission execution for end users and stakeholders within military construction funding constraints.

IGE Roundtable: Shared Risk, What Can We Do Differently? This roundtable discussion followed up on the conversation that started as part of SAME’s 2024 IGE Summit, held during Capital Week in March. The session offered a discussion on challenges with current risk sharing on government contracts and looked at ways to improve contracting methods that increase participation and improve outcomes. Participants drilled down into ways to manage and control risk, extracting insights to help advance alternative delivery and other procurement methods. Until these issues are more under control consistently, the federal sector will go through periods of challenged capacity as businesses look for areas with less onerous acquisition environments.

IGE Roundtable: Installations of the Future—Lessons Learned from Tyndall, Guam & the Way Forward. Another continuation of conversations emerging out from the 2024 IGE Summit, this roundtable looked at what capabilities, factors, and defenses military bases might need in order to meet future challenges on a timeline beyond five or even 10 years. Topics considered by attendees included quickly evolving technologies, digital advancements, new weapon systems, resilience, sustainability, and flexible space for future missions. To ground the discussion in real-world examples, the roundtable also discussed lessons learned from the significant rebuild projects of Tyndall AFB after Hurricane Michael and the experience gained from the expansion of Naval Base Guam to help guide the way forward on future installation projects.

Establishing Trust

Through the open dialogues encouraged at these collaborative sessions (and in other industry-government engagement opportunities at JETC), SAME is fulfilling its mission to increase collaboration in support of our national defense priorities.

Whether structured and intentional engagements covering timely issues such as the IGE Roundtables, exercises that look at macro challenges such as the Warfighter Seminar and FAM Forum, interactive demonstrations like GeoWERX, or simply informal networking that establishes foundational trust among members, SAME is the platform of choice for those committed to advancing national security to be able to come together.

Article published in The Military Engineer, July-August 2024