PUG Chair Corner: Virtual PUG Conference Events and the “Power of You”

August 27, 2020

This year has provided many interesting challenges for us to overcome and the PUG Conference has not avoided these challenges either. In May, the Board announced that the in-person events for the conference were canceled this year and that we were committed to providing essential components virtually. We’re happy to share the updates below and show we’re not only completing essential components but also offering more!

The events are in a different order than usual, but the Board and PTF believe we are still providing good information and presentations to all with this layout. Since many of the Technical Advisory Groups meet monthly, we wanted them to keep a normal meeting schedule so we would not be trying to combine too many things during the week of what would have been the PUG in person events. With the TAGs meeting earlier in the month, that freed up the afternoons for the week of Sept 28 – Oct 1 for the user community to have general presentations and user group business meetings.

This year, the Board had plans to relate all topics and presentations to a central theme. That theme is “The Power of You”. We define the theme in a couple different ways:

1. The power of you speaks to our user community and the rare power we have as we collaboratively develop the software to meet the business needs of transportation agencies.
2. The power of you is putting more capability in the hands of the agency themselves to easily make configurations to their unique business requirements. An example of this is if your agency wants a field on a screen to have a different label, this is a simple change the agency can make without developer level knowledge or coding changes to the application itself.

 

September 10, 2020 10:30AM EST	Data Analytics Technical Advisory Group
September 10, 2020 1:00PM EST	Construction Management Technical Advisory Group
September 14, 2020 2:00PM EST	Preconstruction & Bids Technical Advisory Group
September 15, 2020 2:00PM EST	Materials Technical Advisory Group
September 17, 2020 10:30AM EST	Estimation Technical Advisory Group
September 21, 2020 1:30PM EST	Information Technology Technical Advisory Group
September 22, 2020 2:00PM EST	Civil Rights and Labor Technical Advisory Group
September 28, 2020 2:00PM EST – 5:00PM EST	PUG Presentations –        3rd Party Integrations Update – Brian Guerrette (T&AA) / Chad Shafer (Infotech) / Brian Korschgen (AASHTO) –        AASHTOWare Project.org website – Charlie Groshens (PTF) / Steven Day (Infotech) –        Into to Developing Agency Views – Benjamin Opoku (Virginia DOT)
September 29, 2020 2:00PM EST – 5:00PM EST	PUG Presentations –        Summit Updates – Lisa Durbin (PTF) / Sarah Farmerie (Infotech) –        How a TMR becomes a “Bill” – Jamey Wilhite (PTF) / Chris Brown (Infotech) / Ty Carlson (PUG Board) –        PTF Town Hall – Open Q&A
September 30, 2020 2:00PM EST – 5:00PM EST	PUG User Reps, PTF, PUG Board (Closed Meeting)
October 1, 2020 2:00PM EST – 5:00PM EST	Project User Group Business Meeting