Professional Awards Winners 2020 / 2021

It’s been such a long journey since we first announced the open nominations back in the beginning of 2020. Little did we know that the world would stop for a minute and life would change significantly.

It did take us a little longer than anticipated but we are so happy to announce the PMI Rochester Chapter Professional Awards Winners for 2020/2021 in the following categories:

  • ROC One Community Award
  • Social Good Project of The Year
  • Project Management of Excellence
  • Project of the Year
Social Good Project of the Year

Social Good Project of the Year

Rochester Regional Health: COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics

The PMI Rochester Chapter Social Good Project of the Year award is designed to recognize an outstanding project that best prepares youth, teachers, non-profits, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to promote and exemplify the ideals of project management.
Rochester Regional Health: COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics has been awarded the PMI Rochester Chapter Project of the Year for 2021.
Rochester Regional Health is an acute care facility and network that offers primary medical care and a broad range of specialties. Megan Swartz is the HR Sr. Project Manager at Rochester Regional Health.
In support of COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics located throughout Rochester Area, The Rochester Regional Health Project goal was to build staffing models, logistics of locations, staffing licensure, resourcing, and overall logistics in light of challenges of the short time frames, vaccine supply and expeditious Government directives.
This project initiated January 2021. The project addressed the staffing models included 8 and 12 hour days 7 days a week with a tiered team of Vaccinator, Screener, Scribe, Nursing, Monitors, and facility flow/ greeters to support COVD vaccination clinics.
Megan states: “This project I think was another eye opening example of the fundamentals of project management can bring value to any industry or company. This project team was able to demonstrate that though in crisis a core project team can lead using core toolkits and philosophies of project management to keep an organization and community healthy on the flip of a switch. By collaborating across departments with one central project team meeting up to 7 days a week, the organization, communication, documentation, planning, scoping, and simple controlling of ramping up and down was integral to the success of the Rochester community receiving vaccinations. “
“It helped pull our community together and share all the important nuances of project management in real-time at an exponential rate.”
Congratulations to Megan Swartz, MBA, PMP and the HR Project Team which includes Betty Petro, Interim Chief of HR, Rebecca Alley, VP and Chief Nursing Officer of Nursing, Mary Parlet, VP of Primary Care & Ambulatory Services, Lori Jo McCoy, VP of Compensation, Chelsea Reff, MBA, BSN, RN, Manager of Compensation, Rachel Conley, Manager of Marketing at Rochester Regional Health:
COVID-19 Vaccination Clinics, PMI Rochester Chapter Project of the Year Award of 2021.

Social Good Project of the Year

Megan Swartz

Megan Swartz

Project Manager of Excellence

The PMI Rochester Chapter Project Manager Excellence award is designed to recognize professionals who have exemplified outstanding project management practices and ethics, have made significant positive outcomes in a project as a result of their leadership, technical project management, strategic and business management skills, and have demonstrated a mastery of project management as evidenced by a PMI certification.
Megan Swartz MBA, PMP has been awarded the PMI Rochester Chapter Project Manager of Excellence for 2021. Megan is a Sr. Project Manager at Rochester Regional Health Human Resources Department.
Megan is recognized for as the PM on Rochester Regional Health’s ATS Workday platform. ATS Workday is the software that helps HR manage your hiring process and keep candidate information in a digital form.
Cassandra Cleveland, Marketing Advisor for Rochester Regional Health; nominated Megan and describes her work on the project. “She demonstrated project management knowledge to keep all of us on target to not only meet our go-live, but to also drop definitive dates for each step of our cutover. With parallel processing among multiple teams across the organization, she excelled at communicating to each audience and keeping everyone aware of what were risks and why they were that way.”
Cassandra goes on to state that Megan as team leader and the effect of her work within Rochester Regional Health Human Resources: “As the primary recruiter in the new Workday ATS, I saw first-hand how the planning and execution led by Megan has impacted my job. Not only did I have her as a leader of the project, she was a partner explaining and empowering me to know each step. By having the new system, I can now work smarter and not harder, find improvements in my own workflow, establish a closer rapport and documentation trail with my Hiring Managers, and understand her role in the company and what a project manager does. With her resources, toolkit and leadership style, she left behind a lasting impression and my team is now set-up for success.”
Congratulations Megan Swartz MBA, PMP, PMI Rochester Chapter Project Manager Excellence of 2021.

Megan Swartz

Project of the Year

Project of the Year

Carestream Service System Standup Project

The PMI Rochester Chapter Project of the Year award recognizes projects that best deliver superior performance of project management practices, superior organizational results, and had a positive impact/outcome.
Carestream Service System Standup Project has been awarded the PMI Rochester Chapter Project of the Year for 2021.
Carestream Health is a worldwide provider of medical imaging systems and IT solutions; X-ray imaging systems for non-destructive testing; and precision contract coating services for a wide range of industrial, medical, electronic, and other applications—all backed by a global service and support network.
Carestream recently completed a companywide business transformation called Carestream 2020. The overall goal was to redesign the organization so it had the right structure and footprint that would be optimal for the business. To enable the goals of Carestream 2020, a transformation of the systems and processes supporting Service Operations was needed. A new Service CRM system was needed to enable this transformation and to properly support field service execution of third parties. A project to choose and then implement this new system - SAP’s Cloud for Customer (C4C) - and retire the disparate legacy systems worldwide, was kicked off.
Carestream’s IT PMO and project execution process has matured over time through experience and input from leaders, experienced and certified PMs, and partnering teams. All Carestream IT PMO projects have an executive sponsor, a clear project governance structure, leverage a PMI PMBOK aligned execution methodology, and utilize other Project Management best practices. David Browne, PMP, a Sr. Project Manager within the IT PMO led the Service System Standup project.

David states, “This Service System Standup project was one of the largest in Carestream history and was necessary to support the aggressive business transformation which would result in over $20M of service cost savings globally. It also necessitated the whole world moving to a single harmonized process instead of the different regional models and processes that existed at that point.”
Along with the execution of the PMI framework, David describes the approach to the project to mitigate past failures of replacing the legacy service systems.
“The team took a more iterative development approach. We decided to break things into Iterative builds/releases (by region) which enabled handling manageable size chunks and demonstrating incremental success. We started with the least complex regions and stayed as close to the standard C4C functionality as we could. This allowed for incremental learning and adjustment as needed as we moved forward with more complex regions. It also enabled us to push for process simplification in those regions that were currently more complex by asking for justification as to why a simpler approach – which was already implemented and in use by other regions – could not be used. We believe this learning from past attempts that drove to the iterative implementation approach was probably the biggest reason for our success.”
Key benefits of the Carestream Service System Standup Project include $20M+ of service cost savings globally, a modern multi-lingual cloud-based system that is updated continuously with improvements and works with mobile devices like cell phones and tablets, and Customer Portal and self-serve tools.
David goes on to say, “The new system was also implemented with minimal impact to customers, which was tracked and confirmed by tracking of customer escalations and satisfaction. Overall feedback from internal employees using the system has also been very positive. Company management views the project as a huge success.
The system put in place via the Carestream Service System Standup Project enables Carestream Health to better support our Medical/Radiology customers which in turn helps them to provide more reliable and complete support to their patients. In addition, Carestream can provide better reliability of equipment used by our customers, better response to any issues they may have and better visibility of data for analysis to enable more proactive support.”
Congratulations to David Browne, PMP, and the whole Project Team at Carestream Health which included Core Team: David Browne, Kammy Westphal (IT Tech lead), Jatin Thakkar (Business Project Lead); Executive Board: Andrew Mathews, Scott Rosa, Bruce Leidal; Steering Team: Zhiwu Wei, Manish Gaikwad, Roberto Garcia, Gigi Gasparotto, Rich Fiore, Keith Call, Kyle Wong, Mike King; Regional Champions: Forlani Zhang, Pandurang Kadam, Gonzalo Padilla, Lorenzo Noli, Luis Lumbreras, Elise Wolch; Functional Champions: Bryan Okamoto, Joe Stendardo, Beth Spencer, Antonio Russo, Brian Payne, Dan
Garcia, Emmanuel Martinez; and many, many extended team members across the globe.
PMI Rochester Chapter Project of the Year Award of 2021.

Project of the Year

ROC One Community Award

ROC One Community Award

URMC IPADS FOR INPATIENT TELEHEALTH

This award recognized those individuals (team) whose work has had a significant and demonstrable impact in responding to COVID-19. The project demonstrated: 

  • Problem Solving
    Meeting Urgent Needs
    Treatment and/or Response to COVID-19

ROC One Community Award