Coping with Change

 by George Anderson, ESEP

Our Chapter is nearing the end of another year and we will soon be celebrating together at our Holiday Reception. As always, this will be an opportunity to say thanks to our supporters and recognize chapter members for their service.  Before we close out the year’s business, I wanted to share with you my observations about how we seem to be changing as an organization.  

To begin, our chapter is guided by INCOSE INTERNATIONAL policy and motivated by our membership inputs. Each year before the BOD creates the annual operating plan we conduct a membership survey. This survey enables us to direct our human and financial resources to meet expressed membership needs. 

This year there appeared to be a reduction in overall survey responses and a reluctance to address questions that relate to maintaining the chapter’s health. As always, there are requests for training and certification programs.

Our experience this year has been very disappointing with respect to the success of these programs.  In three offerings of certification and Cameo Tool training we have failed to meet the minimum number of enrollments.  To make matters worse, we have had registrations that were withdrawn at the last minute and nuisance registrations that were likely malicious (internet trolls).  

In another incident, we scheduled a tools fair for October that had very high verbal demand in the local SE community.  Five vendors were scheduled to show their tools and considerable effort was involved setting up the venue and food.  A week prior to the event we were forced to cancel because we did not have a minimum number of paid registrations.  In this case, we believe that the problem was (and probably still is) that many of our members don’t believe that they need to register before the event cutoff.   Well, it will be some time before we put one of these together again given the disappointment of the vendors and the wasted work of our volunteers.  A walk-in attitude is just not good enough to sustain these events.  Please be considerate of your fellow members hard work and dedication in arranging these events and pay when requested.  If you are undecided, please don’t register.

We have already solved most of the enrollment problem by requiring payment at the time of registration.  This does not help, however, with Government enrollees who may have their funding pulled at the last minute or legitimate requests for refunds after the decision to proceed.

The above circumstances certainly will make enrollment more difficult, but of more concern to me is the possibility that a change is occurring in the value of our offerings or the demand for them.   This is a difficult problem to sort out and I think we need to reconcile the painfully obvious gap between what our last survey predicted and the actual results.

We will survey again but I hope that more of the membership will earnestly participate and provide us with accurate indicators of your needs.

 Solving the programs issue is not enough.   Our survey shows that there is little or no interest in working on chapter activities among most respondents.  Also the attendance at our two major social events, the SEP Reception and the Holiday party is waning.  This problem has an obvious, if distasteful, solution and that is reducing the scope of our services.

Our success in the future depends on you, the membership, speaking out on how you view change and perhaps what role you see yourself in as an active member.  After all, if there are no participants, there will be no meaningful chapter services or even a chapter.

Thanks for being a Chesapeake Chapter member this year and helping us promote Systems Engineering education and advancement for every member of the profession.