The UK IT Industry Awards ceremony is now only two weeks away, and in this week’s profile of finalists we look at the shortlist for the IT Project Team of the Year.

The category aims to recognise the achievement of a project team created for a specific business initiative that was completed during the past 12 months. The winner will be the team that has best demonstrated a measurable achievement of project objectives such as budget, timescales, quality, collaboration and team working.

The winners will be announced at the prizegiving party, to be held at Battersea Evolution in London on Thursday 12 November 2009.

To view the full list of finalists for each award, and to book your table at what will be the biggest night of the UK IT calendar, visit our web site at www.computing.co.uk/awards.

Whitbread ­ Simply Better programme
Simply Better was a programme of 12 integrated projects, which identified systems and processes that needed simplifying and improving; created more efficient ways of working; delivered simpler and easier systems in hotel and restaurant sites and increased accuracy and reduced operating costs. Saving £7m per year, the initiative was led by the IT team who integrated diverse projects into a single business change programme.

Standard Life ­ Heal project
Standard Life Healthcare bought First Assist’s private medical insurance business in April 2006. Over the past 12 months all policies and claims have been migrated off the First Assist applications to the new products on Standard Life’s Heal platform and the existing claims platform. Failure to deliver this migration by 30 June 2009 would have resulted in significant payments to the existing supplier. All policies were successfully migrated off by end of April.

Virgin Atlantic ­ IT Lite
Virgin Atlantic runs an IT Lite project team and since its formation 18 months ago, it has delivered more than 200 projects, ranging from a few hours work for reports to several weeks for full systems. All are delivered in an agile fashion and savings to date are £500,000 in revenue protection and more than £400,000 on external spend - a 500 per cent return on investment.

Bradford & Bingley/IBM ­ Transfer of savings IT to Santander
The nationalisation of Bradford & Bingley (B&B) and the sale of its branch network to Abbey/Santander was a milestone in British banking and led to a complex IT project to transfer B&B’s savings IT to Santander. The project was completed within budget and in nine months. All B&B branches, plus three million B&B accounts, worth £20bn, were transferred without disruption to service.

Colt Telecom ­ Infrastructure transformation programme
In 2008, Colt’s IT department undertook its largest project to transform its datacentre estate. Today, Colt has refreshed and rebuilt its internal infrastructure, achieving multimillion-pound savings. Virtualisation technology is the cornerstone of this new platform, delivered by a cross-function team leveraging the skills and expertise of Colt and external resources.

Long Tall Sally/Portal Technology Systems ­ hybris://QuickLive
Retailer Long Tall Sally (LTS) wanted to invest in a single e-commerce platform to support its aggressive expansion strategy. Portaltech worked to understand LTS’s requirements including a three-month implementation cycle. Since going live, LTS has seen significant increases in profitability, competitiveness and a dramatic increase in online revenue.

Lloyds Banking Group ­ Project Hawk
Lloyds Banking Group’s Project Hawk delivered a Financial Services Authority-compliant customer-focused loan payment insurance product in much shorter timescales than expected and within budget. The project involved geographically disparate groups adopting novel approaches, working in tight collaboration and taking shared calculated risks.

Guide Dogs for the Blind Association/Iris NFP Solutions ­ CRM and fundraising system
In July, Guide Dogs went live with its 150-user Iris Care system. In an investment planned to help double the charity’s income by 2015, the project was delivered on time and within budget. The CRM and fundraising software replaced a DOS application.

Aviva UK/Deloitte ­ Datacentre strategy
Aviva’s IT organisation, supported by Deloitte, overhauled its datacentre strategy, taking the financial services firm through outsourcing, achieving strategic and cost reduction objectives within a very difficult market. The savings achieved within the contract over the 10-year period amount to approximately 22 per cent of the current IT budget.

Matalan Retail/Capgemini ­ E-commerce project
Matalan implemented an e-commerce platform with the associated change around people and processes, and saw average order values increase by 25 per cent, customer returns reduced to less than 13 per cent, and a 40 per cent increase in new shoppers.