PCQuest Best IT Implementations Awards 2009

Saturday, July 04, 2009

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Finally, after months of traveling, late night sittings, meetings with project heads, and inspections of lots of interesting IT deployments, it's time to declare the best IT projects amongst the 230+ nominations we received. This time, our jury has selected 14 projects that deserve to be awarded. Usually, we award projects for the maximum business impact, social impact, ingenuity, scale, and technical complexity. This time, apart from these, we've added three new categories. One of them is in sync with the vision of all ICT publications of CyberMedia-Green IT. The other two are for the best automation and the best managed projects. So, there are 8 categories this time as against 5 that we usually have. Plus of course, there's the overall best IT project. Before we get into explaining what's so special about the winning projects, let's understand the process we followed this time for arriving at the winners.

The Awards Process
We start off with a public nomination process, wherein everyone in the IT community is invited to nominate an IT project. The nomination criterion requires that an IT project should be an original idea that leverages IT, or it could be an original usage of technology. It could also be leveraging technology to bring benefits to the user and consumer community, or it could be leveraging technology to bring social or business benefits.

The entire nomination process was done completely online, wherein we sent out email invites and asked people to fill up an online nomination form. During this stage, we received around 250 project nominations. Once we received the nominations, we did a first round of shortlisting, and removed all invalid entries. These included redundant entries, or those that didn't fit the criteria at all, i.e. projects whose benefits were going to foreign countries, or nominations that were filed for products and not IT deployments, etc. This left us with around 230 projects, which were then moved to the second stage, wherein we asked the respective project heads to fill up a detailed audit form about the project. Here, we asked for complete project details, right from specific business or social benefits that they deliver to the technologies used, and even the financials involved. Many projects dropped out at this point, and we finally received detailed audit forms of 125 IT projects. This was the highest number of projects we've received till date for auditing.

Once we received the detailed audit forms, we started the second round of scrutiny and validations. Here, the entries that came in first and within the defined deadline were given priority. We tried our best to accommodate as many entries as we could, but some had to be dropped at this stage. We then looked at each project report in more detail to see if they really fit our selection process, i.e. whether they were indeed original ideas or used technology innovatively,or whether they brought business or social benefits. In each form, we had specifically asked for information like the actual business benefits that were derived, and what really set a project apart from the rest. Many forms didn't provide this information very clearly, and some didn't provide it at all. After scrutinizing all forms, we brought the list of projects down to 104 or so. Each of these was then assigned a project champion from PCQuest. There were eight project champions this time.

The PCQuest team that presented projects before the jury. Top row (L to R): Adeesh Sharma and Vishnu Anand. Bottom row: (L to R): Anil Chopra, Anindya Roy, Rahul Sah, Rakesh Sharma, Swapnil Arora and Sandeep Koul.

The project champions' job was then to understand each project in more detail by either visiting the IT project site, or in case that was not possible, by contacting the IT heads over the phone and email. Here again, many projects dropped out, either due to confidentiality reasons, or the head was not contactable.

For the remaining projects, the entire PCQuest team sat down together to do the shortlisting. By this time, all project champions were completely familiar with the projects they were assigned. During our meeting, we rated each project on ingenuity/innovation, business impact, social impact, technical complexity, and scale of implementation. For each parameter, we gave each project a maximum score of 5. So the maximum total score possible for each project was 25.

Many late night sittings later, we arrived at a list of 26 projects to be presented to the jury. Details on the jury members and the deliberation process is presented on the next article. We would like to congratulate the project heads, their teams, and implementation partners of all the winning projects. Plus, we'd also like to congratulate all the other participants, for taking their organizations ahead using IT. So here we have it, the winners of the best IT implementation awards and the finalists.

A little bit of history
The Best IT Implementation Awards were instituted six years ago. Their objective--to recognize all the good work happening in the country with the help of IT. The number of implementations we have to evaluate has been growing every year. Starting from 10 valid nominations six years ago, we now receive more than 100 detailed IT project reports to evaluate every year. This obviously includes projects from just about every leading company in India. The process of deciding the winners is becoming tougher, because of the growing number of implementations. That's why, we've even dedicated a separate site for the Best IT Implementation Awards, http://forums.pcquest.com/itimplementation. Project heads are welcome to visit this site to know more about the awards, our jury members for the past six years, the winners of all the previous years, as well as the award shows that have happened. Project heads can also given their feedback and suggestions to improve the awards process through this site.

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