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Each year the Northeast Ohio chapter of the Project Management Institute awards one person with a Project of the Year (POY) award who has shown exemplary achievements to the practice of project management. Criteria for the POY award includes:

• the project must be completed in Northeast Ohio in the previous calendar year (2017)
• the award can be given to an individual or a group
• the project can be any type, across any industry, public or private sector
• the nominee does not need to be affiliated with a PMI member
• the nominee does not need to be PMP certified
  (We additionally recognize one Project Manager with the Project Management Excellence award each year, however, in 2017 we did not receive enough eligible nominations.)

There were some great Project of the Year nominations this year. In addition to our winner, we would like to acknowledge a runner up. The project was called "GE Lighting SAP to the Cloud", managed by Bill Cook. This project was 13 months in duration, where the focus was to move the GE Lighting business unit to a new, cloud based data center. The project was completed 6 months ahead of time and 20% under budget, and integrated a new operating model (people, process and technology) with minimal impact to customers. GE Lighting is the only business unit to run a mission critical cloud production system, setting the stage for other GE business units. Congratulations Bill Cook!

The program that is the 2017 winner of the Project of the Year award is called the "Cleveland Metropolitan School District Workday Implementation Program". Workday is a cloud based financial management and human capital management software application. The goal of the program was to move to an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution for all schools and administrative offices. This involved management of change associated with the solution (the people side of change) and leveraged best practices and business processes to enhance the experience. Business benefits realized as a result of the program include increasing operational effectiveness and efficiency through business processes which leveraged an intuitive user experience and a robust, self-service platform. Congratulations to Tim Oberschlake for being the 2017 recipient of the Kerzner Project of the Year award for a job well done on the CMSD Workday Implementation Program.
This years featured presentation by Dr. Harold Kerzner was titled "Risk Management in New Aircraft Development: A Project Management perspective using the Boeing 787 and Airbus A380". After a brief history on aging aircrafts, Dr. Kerzner compared and contrasted the design of new Boeing 787 and Airbus A380 airplanes. Strategies for each design, along with available amenities, were presented and the costs and corresponding risks/risk mitigation strategies were discussed. The presentation provided keen insight into the design decisions and their corresponding impact to the end goal.