Fourth SWWE Project Management Challenge Competition: Finals and Awards Night

On the evening of the 26th April at BAWA in Bristol, around 60 excited sponsors, customers, mentors and team members attended the fourth South Wales and West of England (SWWE) Project Management Challenge Finals and Awards Night with four down-selected teams competing for the winner’s trophy.

At the end of the night after four very impressive presentations, the Winners trophy was awarded to Team Babcock who are based in Plymouth. Team Babcock delivered a project to their chosen charity Dartmoor Zoo, a 30-acre Zoo near the village of Sparkwell on the south-west edge of Dartmoor in Devon. The team worked hard with their charity to deliver a robust and improved maintenance planning and management system that optimises staff resources, improves maintenance processes and reduces reactive maintenance. In turn, this will allow the zoo to allocate more time to mentoring and supporting their ‘Green Prescription’ volunteers.

The overall Winners of the competition, Team Babcock, is shown on the right hand side, with their individual trophies and certificates.

The other Winners award of the evening went to the University of South Wales (USW). USW won the Best Storyboard award for delivering a project to their customer, Aneurin Bevan Health Board (ABUHB), that focused on the collection of foot and ankle condition outcomes, within the community, and the identification of current patient pathways.

The Winners of the Best Storyboard competition, University of South Wales, is shown on the right hand side.

The standard of presentations on the night was excellent and all of the seven teams competing in this year’s competition have obviously worked very hard and have gained lots of valuable experience and knowledge. All of the teams participating in the competition were asked to deliver outputs and benefits to deserving projects across the community and, importantly, were able to demonstrate and develop their own professional project management competences, understand critical success factors, develop personal qualities and learn from their mistakes, as well as get a taste of what it feels like to be part of an integrated team delivering a real project.

The other teams competing in the competition were; Team AirBoost, a combined team from AIRBUS and the University of the West of England (UWE) with their customer Avon Wildlife Trust to deliver migration to a new website; Team FlyHeart, another combined team from AIRBUS and UWE with their customer Aerospace Bristol, to improve the cost and profit visibility of hosting events; Team of Tomorrow, a team from AIRBUS who worked with Envision to improve their Salesforce CRM database; Bristol Water who delivered a project to develop solutions to ‘Beat the Bogus Caller’; and Turner and Townsend working with Swansea University delivered a fund raising project for Champions for Charity 5 Heroes.

Managed by the Project Board consisting of Head Judge Paul Johnson, branch Chair Martin Gosden, and South Wales chapter Chair Allan Reid, the PM Challenge had three key assessment stages:

• Provision of a project plan in December 2017 that identified smart outputs and benefits to be delivered, associated resources, costs and key risks;
• Provision of a final report in March 2018 which demonstrated how the teams delivered the project outputs and benefits defined in the original project plan using a range of competences defined in the APM BoK; 
• The delivery of a 15 minutes presentation at the Awards and Finals Night.

Bruce Phillips, a SWWE branch committee member who lead and managed the competition overall, said “The project board was unanimous in its praise for the significant effort shown by all entries in the SWWE branch’s fourth and very successful PM Challenge competition. The overall standard was very high and the range of projects selected by the teams, based upon the theme of delivering benefits to deserving community services, was very diverse. Every single member of each team should be justifiably proud of their achievements in delivering real benefit to the wider community and, equally as important, the development of their personal and professional competence for the future.”