Highlights from the Final Conference Day
The third and last day of the 101º edition of the International Infrastructure Conference, promoted by FIDIC, International Federation of Consulting Engineers, was focused on FIDIC’s features, work, programmes and partnering organizations.
Young Professionals Discuss Future Leadership
Representatives of the Young Professional Management Training Programme (YPFSC) opened the conference, moderated by their mentor, Steen Frederiksen. Considered the future leaders, those young professionals from different countries spoke about the programme and the way its diversity can benefit them, creating connection. According to them, “connecting people is the key, but connecting knowledge is even better”. The current limitation to achieve it, such as language, culture and geographical issues can be solved by global connection technology, and then they mentioned online education, awareness culture, social media, translators, Wiki and Google.
Excelling engineering, through people and innovative solutions, was the other topic of their speech, and they bring out the question: ‘’How do engineers should feel like?” and then they answer: “They should feel like they are shaping the future”.
Mauro Viegas Filho, luciano coutinho e pablo bueno
Debating Integrity and Sustainability in Engineering
Geoff French, President of Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) and FIDIC Immediate Past President, moderated the theme “Integrity, Capacity Building and Sustainability”. The guest speakers presented an overview about how FIDIC has been working to prevent and combat corruption issues, the industry trends, tools for integrity management and state of global corruption. Maria Vannari, Advisor, Governance and Anti-corruption – Operations Policy and Country Services, from the World Bank, talked about how integrity fits in sustainable development, and showed the principle of the “Integrity Triangle in public and private relationship” where private sector, public employers and financers are the three elements, and why they need to have equal sizes.
Managing Risk, Quality, and Contracts
“Risk & Quality, Contracts and Business Practices” was the theme of the last plenary of the day, moderated by Richard Kell, FIDIC Past President and Senior Consultant Cardno, from Australia. FIDIC’s best practices and standards forms of contracts, its tools to work on the society demands, risk management, the insurance market, Building Information System (BIM) and the importance of selecting good consultants were the focus of the presentations. Kitty Villani Cohen, Director Procurement, Council of Europe, from Development Bank (CEB), discussed about the vantages and advantages of FIDIC’s conditions of contracts (called Pink Book) and what it provides as an international acceptable basis for all tenderers. The reasons why FIDIC invests in these standard forms for contracts and agreements, how it does and what needs to be changed were the topics of Kaj Möller, FIDIC Executive Committee Member and President of SWECO International, in Sweden.
Conference Closing: Key Takeaways and Opportunities
The FIDIC President, Pablo Bueno, and ABCE President, Mauro Viegas, closed the conference, pointing out its importance in learning and sharing knowledge, which means business opportunities. Bueno highlighted that this edition was focused on innovation, and it was present in the event, with the Poken device (technology that allows the exchange of online social networking) and the use of Twitter to send questions during the conference. He also invited the participants to the next conference, in Dubai.
