The ‘IPMA Awards Upgrade’ project is moving fast forward

Last weekend, the international project team met in Munich to work on developing the ‘IPMA Awards Ecosystem’. The project was started last year on the one hand because after twenty years of IPMA Project Excellence Awards, an improvement was needed, and on the other hand, the awards must be integrated into the new strategic concept of the ‘IPMA Ecosystem’.

The team finalized a new vision and purpose for the ‘IPMA Awards Ecosystem’ in Munich based on a worldwide investigation and a survey among IPMA’s member associations.
It reads, “The IPMA Awards ecosystem is the world’s premier choice for recognizing and engaging in exemplary project management at the individual, project, and organizational levels.”

A ‘Value Proposition Canvas’ was used to describe the needs of the various stakeholders and how the ‘IPMA Awards Ecosystem would meet these needs’. Here, the focus was not only on the candidates for the awards but also on the volunteers, the member associations and IPMA itself.

One of the project’s working groups is intensively configuring the ‘IPMA Awards Ecosystem’, particularly the possible award categories and types. Another group is in the process of identifying the various processes and potential ways of digitizing them. One goal of the project is to simplify the processes, achieve efficiency gains through automation and, above all, engage the member associations better.
To this end, the project will build on an available tool that has already been used for the awards at IPMA; however, the aim is to strengthen the consistency and robustness of the processes. Another team is working on improving marketing and events. The entire ‘customer journey’ with the corresponding ‘touch points’ must be considered here.

This year, pilot applications will be implemented with five member associations on selected aspects to ensure a rollout by the end of the year. In parallel, the project team informs delegates and member associations via the newsletter and at the Council of Delegates (CoD) meetings.

Written by: Reinhard Wagner