President’s Notebook
Registrar & CEO's Message
APEGA
MASTER APEGA
tactics and initiatives. Performance Culture underpins the other two priorities. From what I see, a performance culture already exists— but it can always be improved. Now it has the official status of being a strategic priority. There are already forward-looking initiatives launched under the leadership of Registrar & CEO Jay Nagendran, P.Eng. You can learn more by going through this and other PEG editions, and by clicking around apega.ca. During my time on Council and the executive, there’s been a dramatic improvement in our governance effectiveness and in our focus on excellence in self-regulation. Our strategic plan concerns you as licensed professionals. When they reach out to me, professional members often refer to APEGA as “they” or “them,” meaning the staff. I always respond that APEGA is you: our professional members! It’s called self-regulation for a good reason! It is professionalism by peer review. There are all kinds of opportunities to get involved—importantly and especially in our self-regulatory role. Be a true professional: volunteer! Please read and absorb Building a Safe and Resilient Alberta . Think about the ways you can incorporate its strategic priorities into your practice. Think about what you might do to contribute to our professions’ self-regulation. I think I’ve given you enough to think about. Have a wonderful holiday season. Be safe and enjoy your time with family and friends. It’s been a fruitful and enjoyable 2019. I look forward to APEGA’s centennial year, when we can all start building Alberta’s next century.
It Sets the Right Priorities Regulatory Excellence. Trust and Relevance. Performance Culture . These are our distinct yet related priorities. They form a whole and need each other, which for me is the magic of this document. Regulatory Excellence speaks to our very existence. It’s how we will maintain the privilege of self-regulation into our second century. This priority is not an end of its own, though. Regulatory excellence is a pursuit influenced by the political, socio-economic, and technological environments within which we operate. Yet it must never lose sight of the public interest. The plan puts it this way: “For APEGA to perform our role effectively, we need to demonstrate our commitment to upholding the standards of a strong, credible, yet compassionate regulator while safeguarding the public. We must strive for excellence with rigorous and regular reviews of our regulatory operations.” Trust and Relevance , our second priority, is necessary in the successful pursuit of regulatory excellence. We need it to keep demonstrating that we deserve the trust of our professionals, of governments, of the public, and of other stakeholders. To do that, we must present a clear and compelling picture to the public of our people and our work. During our centennial year, we’ll show stakeholders how developing that trust got us this far. We’ll show them that we’ve earned it and that we’re going to continue earning it. In fact, one of the taglines for our centennial is Build Trust and You Can Build Anything . We’ll continue putting ourselves out there, after the centennial year, with an ongoing awareness campaign. Why does this matter? As I said after being sworn in as President, too many Albertans don’t know who we are, what we do, or why we do it. That’s going to change. Performance Culture is a call to action to all of us. Our plan’s third priority, it refers to what Council does in governing the professions. It refers to what you do as licensed members as volunteers fulfilling our self-regulatory responsibility (but we need more volunteers to improve that piece of our mandate; without strong volunteer involvement, we cannot call it self-regulation). It refers to what APEGA staff members do alongside you to turn strategies into
Looking Back, Looking Ahead How a Performance Culture is Setting Up APEGA for Our Next 100 Years BY JAY NAGENDRAN , P.ENG., FCAE, ICD.D, FEC, FGC (HON.) APEGA Registrar & Chief Executive Officer
As I look back on APEGA’s achievements of 2019, it strikes me that the performance culture we’re emphasizing and building upon is critical to our success. Performance culture not only refers to the approaches we take as mem- bers and an organization. It is also a nod to our dedicated staff who set a high bar for both expectations and perfor- mance. Your APEGA Council has made performance culture one of our three strategic priorities. We’re fully embracing it in the work we do, as APEGA’s first century of service winds down and our second one is about to begin. So, from a staff perspective, what has APEGA’s performance culture looked like over this past year? Let me give a quick sum- mary before you dive in to the details in our 2019 Annual Report, which we’ll publish in April. The Consultative Process Many of our performance lessons came from a consul- tative process we honed during a five-year review of our governing legislation, the Engineering and Geoscience Profes- sions Act and General Regulation . The review was like none other in APEGA’s history, and it led to a comprehensive series of recommendations now in the hands of the Govern- ment of Alberta (GoA) to consider. During the review, we engaged a cumulative total of more than 6,000 stakeholders. At the same time, we were also taking a close look at our practice standards and guide- lines. Which ones were most in need of an update? Which ones were generating the most member questions and concerns? We decided to use a consultation system similar to the one we used in the legislative review, as we went to work on the first major update: the Authenticating Professional Work Products practice standard. We held about 30 online and in-person sessions with more than 1,200 stakeholders
across the province, and close to 300 respondents provided input through a follow-up survey. Enforcement of this new authentication standard begins in July 2020. We’ve created online learning materials to help members and permit holders incorporate the proce- dures and processes they’ll need. Next up is a similar upgrade of the Guideline for Rely- ing on Work Prepared by Others . In the coming months, you’ll have more opportunities to learn about and provide input on
Questions or comments? president@apega.ca
LINKS APEGA Strategic Plan 2020 Centennial Celebrations
improvements we’re proposing. Practice Review Process
Also highly consultative is our practice review process, which we’ve been improving over the last several years. Our reviewers work directly with permit holders to make sure their practices represent the professionalism neces- sary to properly protect the public welfare. The practices
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