2012 Graduate of the Year Award Winners

This year’s ceremony represented the 10^th anniversary of these awards which recognise and honour the hard work and high standards of the winners. 

The objectives of the Institute’s “Project Management Graduate of the Year Awards” are to:

• Recognise and honour the high achievers in the qualifying programmes – the Certified Project Management Diploma and the Strategic Diploma.
• Increase awareness of the high quality and standards of IPMA qualification and certification among the business community and the general public.
• Increase the awareness of, and status of, project management as an important business discipline.

The four winner categories are:

1.    Ireland overall national winner - Gavin Murphy

2.    Eastern Region winner - Fidelma O’Brien

3.    Southern Region winner - Jonathan O’Mahony

4.    Western Region winner - Claire Flynn

Gavin Murphy – National Winner  (Strategic Diploma)

With over 15 years of experience in the telecoms sector, Gavin has gained extensive experience in project and programme management. He has contributed to the best project management practices in Vodafone and UPC.

In his current role with UPC Business, he is a client-facing senior project manager with the responsibility to deliver complex and multi-tiered Telecommunications projects to customers of UPC. He also has a significant remit to lead and deliver internal projects, laying the foundations for Product and service rollouts to UPC’s customer base.

He has brought his project management qualifications to practical application in building a ‘best of class’ service delivery methodology in UPC, where speed and quality of delivery are the key performance indicators.

Fidelma O’Brien - Eastern Region Winner  (Certified Diploma)

Fidelma works for FBD Insurance plc. in the Programme Management Office to deliver system change to the organisation, including the full project lifecycle.

As PMO Manager, Fidelma has implemented the setup of the ICT PMO function, including project management,  business analysis and quality analysis.  She has also introduced structured processes for the delivery of ICT Projects and Programmes within the organisation.  Her previous roles within FBD have included ICT Risk & Strategy Manager and ICT Network Manager. 

 She holds a  BCS (Hons) in Information Technology) from DCU and Diploma in Management Studies from the NCIR.

Claire Flynn - Western Region Winner  (Certified Diploma)

Claire studied Information Technology and Telecommunications in the University of Limerick from 1997 until 2001.

She currently works as a Service Delivery Lead with Hewlett Packard in Galway in Mobility Services. The Mobile Cloud Services Team is responsible for delivering mobility services and application development to HPs Global Enterprise customers.

Her previous role in HP was Change, Configuration and Release Manager, with overall responsibility for change management within the Software Management department and ensuring changes conformed to process standards and policies. She recently celebrated the birth of her first child, Aibhe.

Jonathan O’Mahony - Southern Region Winner   (Certified Diploma)

Jonathan graduated from the University of Limerick in 2004 with a  Mechanical Engineering degree.

He currently works with SPX Dollinger as a Projects Engineer / Manager.  SPX Dollinger is an oil and gas filtration company, and its role is to oversee and manage the design, procurement, construction, testing and delivery of filtration systems.               

His medium-term goal is to obtain IPMA Level C Certification & become a Certified Project Manager, and then advance to IPMA Level B. “I see project management certification as a vital means in the industry today for career progression and would encourage more engineers to obtain the same.”