The BCS Individual Excellence Awards recognise notable
achievements and high levels of professionalism across seven
categories
The BCS Individual Excellence Awards are not for the shy and
retiring, as chair of the judges Mike Kearsley explains: "You have
to be in it to win. Each medallist is interviewed by a panel of
judges, and applicants have to make sure to boast to the judges
about everything there is no room for modesty about their
achievements."
This year's awards involved seven individual categories where
judges were looking for professionalism and highly successful
contributions made by the IT professional to their business.
"This year has been an excellent year in both quantity and
quality of candidates, and it is good to see so many new
organisations putting their staff forward," says Kearsley.
Ensuring that fresh fruit and vegetable produce is correctly
labelled literally in the field where it is picked and packed was
the challenge that one award winner overcame. This year's IT
Developer of the Year Award, sponsored by InterSystems, was won by
Richard Jones, development director of Anglia Business
Solutions.
In managing the project, Jones showed great understanding of and
empathy with the level of end-users' IT skills, and introduced a
highly innovative IT system to an environment that was previously
entirely paper based.
The challenges included implementing .net tools to provide a
label checking system across several languages and geographic
boundaries, in order to meet the needs of the diverse
nationalities.
Jones also solved the problem of making vast amounts of data
stored on a central database available offline on a mobile device,
through his innovative idea of "store and forward". This allows
data to be collected on an offline mobile device and then
synchronised with the central database when back online.
The medallists for IT developer of the year were: Mark O'Farrell
of Farrellsoft, Jason Cole of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group and
Meeraj Kunnumpurath of Voca.
For Saqib Shaikh, this year's winner of the Young IT
Practitioner of the Year Award, starting his first job with
Vodafone simply was not enough of a challenge. Shaikh also set up
MacVisionaries, a company specialising in products and services to
help the blind use Mac computers.
The judges selected Shaikh, a technical graduate now working for
Microsoft, in recognition of his professionalism, enthusiasm and
determination to succeed.
Shaikh, who is blind, gained a first-class honours degree at
Essex University, earning the highest mark in his class and going
on to complete a master of science before seeking employment.
Shaikh's ambition is to gain a senior management role or start
his own business. He has already begun investigating how to gain
BCS Chartered IT status and is keen to progress his career
further.
The medallists for young IT practitioner of the year were: Paul
Cheek of TeamSpirit Software, Mark Alexander of Graham Technology
and Iain McGinniss of Graham Technology.
Delivering learning to meet clients' needs, and having a good
understanding of how to make it relevant to non-IT specialists by
including everyday solutions, helped Dave Britt, a principal
technologist with QA-IQ, win this year's IT Trainer of the Year
Award sponsored by Training Synergy.
The judges were impressed by Britt's dedication to delivering
training services using a wide variety of methods, incorporating
traditional classroom-based techniques, as well as using technology
to deliver e-learning and distance learning opportunities.
To ensure course material is relevant to the real world
experience of his clients, Britt has taken an active part in
supporting the IT community through a blog and contributes to
forums and discussion groups.
The medallists for IT trainer of the year were: Michelle Mook of
Matrix FortyTwo, Edmund Lepre of Happy Computers and Nick Noble of
LogicaCMG.
This year's IT Service Manager of the Year Award was a close
contest, but Paul James, a customer service manager with Stockport
Metropolitan Borough Council, was eventually nominated as
winner.
James manages the customer services department within the
corporate IT unit in the borough, including the service desk,
datacentre, IT training and the e-government project teams.
Over the past 12 months James has successfully project managed
an IT Infrastructure Library-based service improvement project
implemented service level management and incident management
processes restructured the service desk, resulting in a 9% increase
in first-time resolution, and has improved customer satisfaction by
13%. James was also responsible for delivering the e-government
agenda one month ahead of schedule.
The medallists for IT service manager of the year were: Simon
Wright of Rail Settlement Plan, Dave Roberts of Retail Assist and
Richard Godbolt of Lloyds TSB Group.
A project to automate the 125-year-old postal order and ensure
that the Post Office did not face a significant business loss has
won Ray Jackson, programme manager of IT for the Post Office, the
PMR Project Manager of the Year Award.
Jackson was selected for his delivery of the Post Office S90
release, which was key to enabling branches to accept debit and
credit cards for Bureau de Change transactions. In addition, the
project automated the inventory management process for the 72
currencies it offers, enabling branches to be part of the back-end
track and trace services, and providing improved communications
resilience for the network of more than 14,500 Post Office
branches.
The judges felt Jackson demonstrated excellence in project
management by ensuring error-free support systems and applications,
as well as demonstrating management and communications skills,
systematic support of staff and a good understanding of the needs
of non-IT staff.
The medallists for project manager of the year were: Lachlan
Macdonald of the Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Rob Wetherill of the
Royal Bank of Scotland Group and Mike Moore of Calibrand.
Scottish Water has faced a major four-year business
transformation programme, which included achieving challenging
regulatory targets and the completion of a £1.8bn capital programme
designed to create significant improvements in the national water
infrastructure.
For his work on the programme David Brown, general manager of IT
for Scottish Water, has been awarded the Deloitte IT Director of
the Year Award (for large organisations), presented in association
with the Institute of Directors.
Brown's work involved managing the £66m IT development programme
that underpinned the business transformation. This required either
the redevelopment or re-implementation of every legacy system and
every aspect of the legacy technology infrastructure all of which
was completed within the required timescale and £1.2m under budget.
The project also reduced IT running costs in line with the
four-year target of 40%.
The judges were seeking someone who could demonstrate a thorough
understanding of IT issues, excellent people management skills,
commitment to training and development, planning ability, financial
acumen and a substantial contribution to the strategy and general
management of the organisation.
The medallists for IT director of the year for large
organisations were: Simon Kosminsky of SJ Berwin, David Matthewman
of Norwich and Peterborough Building Society and Al-Noor Ramji of
BT Exact.
The IT Director of the Year Award (for SMEs), sponsored by
Claranet and in association with the Institute of Directors, was
awarded to Neil Pearson, chief technology officer at educational
publishers Hotcourses.
The judges were impressed by Pearson's determination and vision
on a project that was initially met with some scepticism by
colleagues. Pearson created an offshore capability for Hotcourses
that has enabled it to continue to innovate while keeping costs
under control.
Pearson has enabled Hotcourses to compete against the largest of
the systems integrators for education sector IT and data processing
contracts - both in terms of price and quality. This is now a
fundamental part of its business strategy going forward.
The medallists for IT director of the year for SMEs were: Tony
Pearson of Proteus Software, Paul Broome of i-CD Publishing and
Chris Thorn of Chameleon Net.