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APM Volunteer Achievement Awards 2020 nominee: Volunteer of the Year – Merv Wyeth

Reinventing webinars: Creating value through high quality online meeting design

Charting the progress of APM webinars

Merv has been actively driving webinars on behalf of APM Benefits and Value SIG for ten years. Between November 2017 and February 2020, he organised the APM Benefits Management series, galvanising support for APM’s marketing campaign for benefits management.

Effective Benefits Management and Preparing for Post-Pandemic World Webinar Series

The series opened with joint webinars with the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) marking the publication of the Guide to effective benefits management in major projects and the Project Delivery Capability Framework for civil servants. Merv and the SIG had been heavily involved in the creation and promotion of both.

Covid-19 The webinar imperative

On Thursday 12 March 2020 Merv spoke at APM Programme Management SIG conference in Birmingham. The spectre of lock-down was looming, so Merv proposed to significantly increase the number of virtual rather than physical events. APM Scotland conference the following week was cancelled and shortly afterwards the entire branch event programme.

Having previous organised the Effective Benefits Management series, Merv was well placed to fire up a response from APM volunteers. Merv called in some favours from his enormous network of renowned speakers, who would ordinarily charge for travel and accommodation and even a speaker fee.

The first of presentation by Jane Sparrow on the topic of Making remote working work – keeping productivity and an eye on well-being provided important know-how to members on coming to terms with overcoming the cultural challenges of working from home. Jane is an international speaker, whom Merv had previously recruited to speak at a ProgM SIG evening event and webinar.

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