It takes real effort for a consulting organization to develop and retain a group identity. Consultants often work at client sites and are surrounded by clients who aren’t coworkers. We can get caught up in our clients’ problems and successes. It’s important for Summa as an organization that our consultants periodically renew their connection to the “home base.”

One way that Summa employees stay connected to one another is through our annual Summa Summit and anniversary party. In the fall of 2000, then-CEO Ed Engler gathered together all of Summa’s staff for a “Summit,” which has been repeated almost every year since then. The Summit has become one of the most important times in the Summa calendar, and it helps us all reconnect, share success stories, and plan for the year to come.

We also throw a big party.

2010 is the 10th Summa Summit. In previous years we’ve held the Summit downtown in Pittsburgh or at Seven Springs, but for the first time this year, we went out of state. On Friday, September 24th, the company took a predawn bus from Pittsburgh to the Embassy Suites in downtown Cleveland.

On the bus to Cleveland

After a quick breakfast we got into company meetings and updates from Summa’s various practices. We’ve expanded a great deal in the last year, so this was the first opportunity for a lot of us to hear from the company’s leadership. Leadership talked about our successes in the previous year, highlighted some of our clients’ ongoing activities, and talked about our targets for the next few years.

Over lunch a number of awards were handed out, including service awards and gifts for those reaching their 3, 5, or 10-year anniversary with Summa. We ended the work part of the day with “Open Spaces” — our term for parallel moderated open discussions on a variety of topics — technical, consulting, and business discussions.

After that — fun! We piled into the bus for a ride to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. We spent a few hours rocking out — a few Summa employees had visited the Summit in appropriate gear…

Slash and Elvis... kind of...

After the Hall, dinner and drinks at the House of Blues. This gave us a chance to kick back, relax, and socialize.

One of the more crowded dinner tables at the Summit

After dinner plenty of us went downstairs for a hilarious, awesome, and strangely non-ironic concert from a band calling itself Mega 80s. We packed the floor and had a great time. We’re not showing you any pictures of that… but trust me, it was a great time.

Saturday — we opened with another Open Spaces session, then several project teams provided updates on some of our longer-term projects. We closed the Summit with a strategy panel discussion where the management team fielded questions.

CTO Rick Kotermanski participates in an Open Spaces discussion

Like every year, this year’s Summit was a great time. Despite holding it in a new city, we all took advantage of the opportunity to reconnect with one another and learn what was going on elsewhere in the company, and discuss and influence our plans for 2011.

Special thanks to Handerson Gomes for the pictures from this year’s Summit!

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