Fall is an exciting time of year for ActiveOps. In addition to our Capacity24 conferences taking place around the world, it’s the time when we celebrate the winners of our annual ActiveOps awards. The awards are a chance for ActiveOps to recognize the incredible achievements of organizations, teams, and individuals who have delivered operational excellence and outstanding performance. In fact, you could say that an ActiveOps award is the ultimate treat for any Ops Game Changer.
In this blog, you can discover what awards are on the menu, and then dig into a chat with two of our judges this year, Nicole Mott and Alex Darko, for an insider look at the awards.
What award categories are there?
Our awards come in four mouth-watering flavors:
Excellence in Operations
This award rewards the highest operational performance and practices that enable continuous improvement, transformation, and business impact.
Operations Team of the Year
Ops team of the year celebrates teams working together to deliver outstanding operational performance, customer experience and business impact.
Executive of the Year
This award celebrates the individuals within operations who lead the charge, change the game, and drive transformation. They elevate the role of operations to deliver better customer and business results.
NEW FOR 2024: More3
The More3 award celebrates those ops leaders who, after 3 or more years of working with ActiveOps, are continuing to extract MORE value and drive continuous transformation.
Interview with the judges
Every ActiveOps award is judged by a panel of regional experts. To give you some insight into the process, we sat down with two of our EMEIA judges: Nicole Mott and Alex Darko. Nicole is an award-winning senior leader who has led insurance ops teams for eighteen years and most recently led Velonetic’s transformation efforts. She’s also recently joined ActiveOps as our Enterprise Account Director for Insurance. Alex is a veteran of Dun and Bradstreet’s operations, and has led back-office operations in a wide range of industries. Since 2023, he has also been the regional chair of ActiveOps in Africa. Here’s what they had to say…
Hi Alex, hi Nicole, thanks for taking the time to speak to us. Can you start by telling us what the judging process has involved this year?
Alex Darko: The process started with ActiveOps customers being invited to submit nominations in whichever categories they wanted to participate in. After that, the judges evaluated and scored each entry to come up with a list of finalists – which was not easy!
Nicole Mott: Once we had a list of finalists, we held interviews with each of them, where we discussed their nomination and their achievements in more detail, looking hard for details showcasing the impact our customers had on their operations. From there, we decided on our winners – and they’ll be announced at the gala dinners at each Capacity24 event in September and October.
AD: It was an incredibly talented field of entries this year. Each nomination truly showed the impact operations can have on customer experience, employee experience, and the wider business. Personally, I found it so heartwarming to read and hear ActiveOps customers talking about the value they’ve got out of the technology.
NM: I completely agree. I actually moved to ActiveOps from Velonetic mid-way through the judging process, and the experience of judging these entries has affirmed for me that ActiveOps is a great company to work for. And the experience of working with the other judges in EMEIA – Marc Romain, Emma Price, and Laura Quest – was fantastic.
Brilliant. So, what can you tell us about this year’s finalists?
AD: Every one of them is world-class. There’s a spread of huge organizations with incredibly complex workflows and operations represented, which is a real testament to their hard work and the power of ActiveOps. And this year, with the More3 award, there’s been a focus on clients who continuously raise the bar to transform their teams and organizations. That’s a real vote of confidence and wonderful to see.
NM: Personally, I found our finalists eye-opening. The nominations we had were very strong; seeing the finalists speaking during the interviews, experiencing their passion, helped bring the stories to life even more. Our exec of the year entrants were particularly charismatic and inspiring – it wasn’t hard to see why they were nominated!
Speaking of the More3 award – what do you think of ActiveOps’ newest flavor of award?
NM: It’s so important to recognize that operations excellence isn’t a ‘one and done’ thing. The beauty of ActiveOps is that behind the technology there’s a methodology that can completely reshape an organization’s operations, delivering long-term benefits that are so powerful. It’s brilliant that we’re finally celebrating that.
AD: I was amazed to see how many different ways customers gain value from ActiveOps over time. Our finalists this year are doing incredible things. One example that stands out now is an organization that’s been actively upskilling and cross-skilling teams over three years, resulting in a large number of promotions or lateral moves in the organization. That’s had a big impact on employees, of course – they’re more fulfilled and engaged with their work. But it’s also kept vital skills within the business, where otherwise those people and their skills might have moved on. Another is using the data from ActiveOps to gain deep understanding of their teams and processes to raise the standard of work across massive areas of their organization. Unlocking these sorts of benefits at scale is amazing to see.
All will be revealed at Capacity24
We’re really looking forward to announcing the winners at the gala dinners, taking place after each Capacity24 conference in Toronto, London and Melbourne. There’s not long to go now – so all that remains to be said is thanks to all our judges for their hard work, and best of luck to all our ActiveOps Awards 2024 finalists! And, of course, if you’d like to attend Capacity24, all you have to do is click below to register.
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