I’m here in Orlando, Florida for the PMI Global Congress North America at the Gaylord Palms Resort and Convention Centre.

Yesterday was the first day of Congress, and it’s the 40th birthday of PMI, so everyone is treating it as a very special occasion. The main events were the Global Accreditation Centre Academic Forum (which looked at innovations in project management education), annual meetings for each of the Virtual Communities and the final Leadership events for those members who are part of chapters or committees – the Leadership conference has been running for a couple of days already, and has now wound up. The biggest event of the day was the awards ceremony and reception.

The awards ceremony took place in the massive Osceola ballroom, and the idea was for us to “honour the best of the best in project management”. Heathrow Airport Terminal 1 was up for Project of the Year and as a London girl, I was crossing my fingers for that one! Unfortunately, it didn’t win, and if you’ve been following the Congress on Twitter using the hashtag #pminac you will have seen the winner being announced in real-time: it was Fluor Enterprises for their Newmont TS Power Plant project – building a power plant in an inhospitable bit of Nevada, so congratulations to them.

Cirque Odyssey performed at the awards, which was brilliant, and broke up the ceremony a bit. There were other awards given out, on top of the Project of the Year. The award winners announced tonight were:

- Distinguished Project Award: Freescale Semiconductor Inc for their final manufacturing organisation IT & Manufacturing partnership; also awarded to PMI Baltimore Chapter for their work with volunteers

- PMI Community Advancement Through Project Management Award — Individual Category: Tim Mattimoe for his work in Africa

- PMI Eric Jenett Project Management Excellence Award: Upendra Giri for cementing project management practices in India

- PMI Research Achievement Award: Jeffrey Pinto

- PMI David I. Cleland Project Management Literature Award: Kathleen Hass for her book Managing Complex Projects: a new model

- PMI Continuing Professional Education Provider of the Year Awards: Cadence Management Corporation for their master course in the multi-disciplinary approach of planning and implementing projects; and to IBM for their in-house work on their internal project management curriculum

- PMI Continuing Professional Education Product of the Year Award: Alpha Consultoria for their seminar on effective project management; and to Euro Bank SA for their ‘Mayday, Mayday’ workshop

On top of this, there were eight people receiving the PMI Distinguished Contribution Award and seven new Fellows elected to the Institute. There were also awards for the PMI Components and the PMI Educational Foundation.  You can read some of the reactions of the award winners on the Voices of Project Management blog here.

After the awards were announced, PMI had laid on drinks and food – a very nice dim sum!