44 India's Best IT Implementations of the year 2005

Implementations that have broken new ground, are a role model for others to follow, or unique. The PCQuest best IT implementation survey tries to capture and bring to you some of India's best IT projects

Friday, June 03, 2005

The Best IT implementation awards are now two years old, and over the last year, we have been able to clearly lay out the procedure for determining the winners.

This year, we had a four-tier process, starting with the public nominations and ending with the jury deliberations. The whole process took two and a half months.
For those who are not aware of the process, here is a brief overview.

Nominations open in the month of February and any one can nominate a project. There are two conditions for a project to be nominated. First, the project should have become operational during the financial year in which the nomination opens. Second, the benefits of the project should be available in India. Though the physical infrastructure could be anywhere. 

Our definition of project completion is kept fairly loose to give the projects the benefit. The project has to have started functioning and delivering. You could have done a soft launch, or could be in the midst of a launch process.

Nominations are accepted both at the project website and on paper. (This year, all nominations, barring one, were received at the project website.) Any one can nominate any project. It is not necessary that you nominate your own project; though you could nominate your own.

The opening of nomination is publicized through e-mail and print announcements sent to more than 5000 people, including senior management in IT user companies, Senior Government officials, IT industries and so on. The nominations are open for about a month (though we do try and include good projects even if they are a bit late). At the end of this time period, we go through all the nominations and try to complete incomplete nominations as well as remove redundant ones. We also remove projects that are as yet incomplete or the ones that have been completed before the time window. 

Once this is done, we get into the serious task of short listing projects for collecting follow-up data. The follow-up questionnaire is a 15-page document that collects detailed information on background, concept, business case, people involved, project architecture, technologies involved, consultants involved, timelines, milestones and financials. Some of the information we collect is marked as confidential and is not disclosed. The PCQuest team gets involved in getting the documentation complied.

This year, we had a total of 47 projects for which the detailed documentation was sought. Some projects dropped out at this stage because of confidentiality issues, and some sadly, because the project heads were simply too busy during that time. 

Once the documentation is completed, we start analyzing the projects and short-listing the finalists. We use a five-point criteria for this short-listing. This year, 16 projects made it to the finals. after the shortlisting.

At this stage, we start talking to the project heads, and even visiting the implementations to get an in depth understanding about the projects.

PCQuest appoints an internal champion for each project. It is that champion's responsibility to understand the project in detail and to present its case to the jury. 

Finally, the jury meets to decide the final winners. The jury has representation from past winners, IT users and the IT industry. The jury decides the final winners of each of the awards. It is also free to recommend additional awards, if they feel the need. This year, the jury did not recommend any changes to the awards structure, over the last year.

Anil Chopra, Anoop Mangla, Krishna Kumar, Sujay V Sarma

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