McGill University in Montreal, Quebec pioneered an innovative course designed to give university students a chance to work with an industry participant on a real-world problem. The program has been in practice for the past 35 years, and has facilitated over 200 projects. Students work on an engineering problem, provided by a company, involving product design, manufacturing processes, or service improvement. The program allows senior mechanical engineering students and industry leading companies to become fully immersed in the systematic problem solving technique, Value Engineering.

The course is lead by a certified value specialist (CVS), which allows students to work towards both course credit and MOD I certification. Benefits of the program are felt both by the student and the industry participant. Industry participants receive real solutions to the problems, as well as potential new talent for their organization. As part of the course students prepare presentations of their findings as well as a written report.

For more information see:

• Value Engineering at McGill University
• 2007 Student Presentations

This seminar is based on emerging techniques to undertake risk-based evaluations of schedule and cost. These techniques are mandatory under standard protocol in some public agencies in the U.K., Washington State, and in the U.S. Federal Transit Administration. Many other Federal, State/Provincial, and municipal agencies and utilities in the U.S. and Canada are beginning to apply these methods on their more challenging infrastructure projects.

This seminar will illustrate how Risk-Based Evaluation of infrastructure projects is a useful technique that improves the management of infrastructure projects, enables non-technical decision makers to understand cost and schedule uncertainties, and enables technical staff to manage uncertainties.

This seminar presents an innovative, practical, and cost-effective approach that helps mitigate these problems by: 1) quantifying actual project cost and schedule uncertainty within a probabilistic, risk-based, integrated cost and schedule model, 2) identifying and prioritizing critical cost and schedule risks and opportunities, as well as quantifying the benefits of proposed mitigation strategies to address those critical risks and opportunities; and 3) improving owner and project team understanding and communication.

For more information see:

• 2008 Conference Training page