The Jury

What's new in this project?



Is what the jury asks and looks for in all the projects that are presented

to them by the PCQuest team. This is bound to happen when you have an

experienced jury who's been through the thick and thin of IT and seen so many IT

deployments in their careers. The jury meet is therefore the last and most

important step in the Best IT Implementation Awards process. This is where the

final winners are decided. This time, 24 projects made it to the jury (out of

the 200 valid nominations received). Last year, we had spun off Green IT as a

separate award category. This time, we've done a similar exercise for the e-Gov

projects. This category was created based on a recommendation made by our last

year's jury.

The Process



This time, we received around 230 IT projects during our public nominations

phase. The PCQuest team did a preliminary check and removed all entries that

didn't fit our standard criteria (read it at http://ld2.in/8e), as well as all

redundant or invalid entries. The project heads of the remaining 200 projects

were then contacted and asked to fill up a detailed audit form. 116 of  them

were received, and were moved to the next stage, while the remaining were

eliminated from the awards process. The PCQuest team then spent time auditing

these IT projects, studying them in more detail, interacting with their project

heads to get their doubts clarified, and visiting the deployment locations

wherever feasible. Many projects dropped out at this stage as well either

because the project heads were not available, or the implementation was

incomplete. After completing the audits, the team sat together and did a

post-mortem of each IT project. Each project is then discussed at length for

it's impact (business or social), ingenuity or newness, technical complexity,

scale, etc by the PCQuest team. Several late nights and weekends later, the team

arrived at the final list of audited projects to be presented to the jury.

When the PCQuest team presents the shortlisted projects to the jury, one

person from the team is identified as the 'advocate' for each project. This is

the person who's interacted with the project head, gone through its details, and

understood everything about it. Members of the jury ask the PCQuest team further

questions on each project. This information is provided from the audit report

that the project implementers have filled up or from in-depth discussions that

the advocate has had with the implementers. Finally, after all the projects have

been presented, the jury decides the winning projects. Here, the PCQuest team

does not participate in the jury's deliberations.

The PCQuest jury for the Best IT Implementation Awards comprises of eminent

personalities from the IT industry. This time, there five members in our jury

panel, with representation from the IT industry, user industry, media, and

government. We take special care to ensure that those who have their projects in

the running are not on the jury. And with nearly 200 projects in the running,

that can become a difficult task. The IT industry itself had many projects in

the running. So, we were indeed extremely lucky to get a very experienced jury

to judge the projects this year. We also clearly state to the jury that in case

there's a conflict of interest, wherein any of the jury members has been

involved in any of the projects in any way, then that jury member must withdraw

from the discussion for that project.