Is it time for the Project awards?

Regional paper, The Northampton Advertiser, ran a story recently about The Wing at Silverstone. The story highlighted the fact that it had been nominated for a prestigious architectural award.

This got me thinking, why not prestigious Project magazine award?

On the shortlist would be projects that have captured the imagination, broken new ground in terms of design, scale, cost etc.

Over the past 12 months we’ve featured a whole bunch of ‘worthy’ finalists.

In April ran a piece on the Mercedes Biome project – a futuristic car design that emits nothing more than oxygen. Of course, it was complete fiction but that’s not the point. It was exciting. It offered an insight into the creative process and pushed at the boundaries. So why not, ‘Most Creative Project of the Year?’

Then there are the social projects. In August/September we ran stories on the MyFarm and MyFootball Club projects. Both are unconventional in the sense that they outsource decisions to large groups of people, but underlying it are solid PM techniques. MyFarm has over 10,000 online users, MyFootball over 3,000. I’d argue that both are fine examples of community-based projects.

And why not take it a stage further and recognise locally run projects? Patrick Read is not a qualified PM but, armed with the ‘bare bones’, he’s been project managing (almost singlehandedly) a successful athletics event for local primary school children for years. There must be thousands of ‘Patricks’ out there. Heck, the BBC has commissioned a whole series on ‘community champions’ and called it Village SOS.

Finally, with possibly the most high profile project in years arriving next summer, why not make more of the Olympics? We’ve covered the recording-breaking Stadium project; we’ve tweeted about the ‘good looking’ velodrome; we’ve even flagged-up the thousands of trees, plants and acres of turf contributing to the Park’s green legacy. The possibilities, as they say, are endless.

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