An international jury of experts honours the Danish leadership development company Mannaz for its unique learning methods. It is above all a new way to think and implement project management that has contributed to the prestigious award being granted to Danish companies. The mindset behind has already led to noticeable bottom line improvements in the global engineering group and co-winner COWI, where customer satisfaction has also increased significantly just as the number of complaints has been remarkably reduced.
Five years ago, COWI and Mannaz launched a so-called Project Management Academy. This was done in order to professionalise the more than 13,000 projects that COWI participates in worldwide. It is the result of this project that is now granted the most prestigious award for managerial competence development, the so-called ‘Excellence in Practice Gold Award’ (EiP).
Lars-Peter Søbye, CEO of COWI, says: ‘For us The Project Management Academy has been a true game changer, and without it, we would never have achieved the success we are seeing today.
The education and training project managers receive at the Academy helps them react faster when projects are challenged. At the same time we have improved dramatically on the quality we deliver – leading to a remarkable increase in customer satisfaction. These have been important contributing factors for our ability to deliver, for the second consecutive year, the best financial result in our 85-year old history,’ Søbye says.
The award is granted by the European Foundation for Management Development (EFMD), which represents more than 25,000 management specialists from over 80 countries. The organisation is also a globally renowned accrediting body, which among other things assesses the quality of management education and technology supported learning programmes.
‘I am extremely proud of all my colleagues. Receiving this particular award means receiving recognition that cements our skills and illustrates the results we aim to achieve for our clients; not just in Denmark, but also in the offices in Malmö, London and Hong Kong, and for our many global clients and partners,’ says Mette Vestergaard, CEO of Mannaz.
Dorthe Thyrri Rasmussen, Client Director, adds: ‘We see this recognition as an international seal of approval for our learning methods. For many years, we have been able to document the effect of our methods with regard to learning. The interesting thing – well, almost revolutionary – is that we are now able to document that the learning methods have a real and measurable impact on the bottom line. In other words, learning is good business.’
Jan Ginneberge from EFMD says the following about their decision:
“Mannaz and COWI won the Gold Award, because the partnership tackled a serious business problem that had significant personnel and financial implications for COWI. Turning engineers into genuine project managers capable of facing complex scenarios, having endurance while dealing with frequent scope changes and sudden turnovers, and having increased awareness and control on the project budgets and customer relationships, significantly boosted skills-levels as well as efficiency, relationships and impact.”
Mannaz A/S: Client Director Henrik Bjerrgaard Nielsen, tel. +45 4517 6259
COWI A/S: Head of Global Media Relations, Ursula Taylor Rechnagel, tel. +45 42 31 66 20
Read more about the case and the results of the Project Management Academy at COWI