AACE International Annual Meeting 2020

Last month marked my second attendance at an Annual meeting of AACE International (formally Association for the Advancement of Cost Engineering).  The Covid-19 Pandemic forced a change of venue from Chicago to Virtual/Online, with overall good results.  Most of the technical presentations were pre-recorded for viewing at leisure.  There was also a live track including keynotes, selected technical presentations, and business meetings.  There were attempts to facilitate online “networking” and other informal “events”, but I missed those.

Earlier in the year, I co-authored a paper (with Patrick M. Kelly) for presentation at the meeting: (PS-3496) Interpreting Logic Paths in Multi-Calendar Project Schedules.  It’s essentially a deep-dive into the Multiple Float Path calculation in Oracle Primavera P6 project scheduling software, expanding on (and in a few cases contradicting) my earlier blog articles, and Patrick’s paper, on the subject.  A slightly revised version of the paper is hosted on our website.  Pre-recording the presentation (as a narrated PowerPoint show) involved quite a bit more effort than a live presentation would have; I hope to become more efficient at it with additional practice.

The presentation (all 70+ minutes of it) and the paper are included in the Transactions bundle for registered attendees of the meeting.  They are also available for purchase by non-attendees (including a training certificate after viewing the presentation) at the AACE store.  I think the price is $25 for members of AACE and $30 for non-members.

I also got “elected” to the board of the Planning and Scheduling Subcommittee, and I look forward to taking over the coordination of our Recommended Practices from our rising Chairman, Jessica Colbert, for the next year.