Eligibility Requirements

The Humphrey Award may be presented to nominees that meet the following requirements:

• The award may be presented to an individual or a group. Recipients are most often employees of the target organization. The recipient may also work for an organization that provided software engineering quality improvement services to the target organization. For example, the recipient's organization may be an organization that provides training or quality measurement consulting to the target organization, or it might be an association that supports activities related to software engineering quality improvement that benefit one or more target organizations.
• Because software engineering quality improvement activities are normally group activities, a nominee is usually a team of professionals. However, to recognize work within small organizations or within organizations that do not formally define a software engineering quality improvement-related team, a nominee may be an individual or a small, informal group or team.
• The target organization may be for-profit, not-for-profit, or non-profit; may be an industrial, academic, or government organization or foundation; and need not be based in the United States.

Conditions

A nomination must be endorsed by a senior executive from the nominee's organization. If the target organizations are different from the nominee's organization, then the nomination must also be endorsed by a senior executive from each of the target organizations. In addition to endorsing the nomination, these senior executives must agree to the following:

• None of the data and information in the nomination material is proprietary or confidential.
• On request, the nominee will provide additional detailed data and information regarding the software engineering quality improvement-related work. If any of the additional data and information is proprietary or confidential, it will be clearly marked as such.
• If selected as an award recipient, the nominee will participate in a webinar presentation to be hosted by the SEI and will receive a commemorative plaque at the IEEE Computer Society award ceremony.
• All data and information that the Humphrey Award Selection Subcommittee uses as the basis for an award will be published in the SEI technical report, perhaps in some modified form mutually acceptable to the Chair of the Selection Subcommittee and the award recipient.
• If an on-site visit is required (the Selection Subcommittee will primarily use videoconferencing technology), all travel expenses will be reimbursed by the nominee's and/or the target organizations, with international travel reimbursed for one Selection Subcommittee member at business-class airfare rates.
• Subcommittee members will not be required to return the nomination material, any non-proprietary or non-confidential material submitted in response to requests for additional information, or any non-proprietary or non-confidential material distributed during a site visit.

Nomination Materials

The nomination material must contain an overview that consists of no more than two pages identifying the nominee, briefly describing the nominee's software engineering quality improvement-related work, and concretely demonstrating the work's impact and excellence.

This overview must identify the following:

• the nominee, the target organizations, and the nominee's relationship to the target organizations
• one to three individuals who will represent the nominee organization in any award-related activity
• a point of contact for interactions between the Humphrey Award Selection Subcommittee and both the nominating and nominee organizations

In addition, and most importantly for demonstrating award-winning work, the overview must, with respect to the target organizations, do the following:

• define the goals for the nominee's software engineering quality improvement work, describing the work briefly and succinctly
• summarize evidence that the work met the goals and had a positive effect on the target organization
• summarize the work's direct impact and significance (e.g., in terms of productivity and quality improvements)
• summarize the work's indirect impact and significance to the software engineering process improvement community at large

The overview must be supplemented by no more than 10 additional pages of supporting data (e.g., graphs, figures, tables, or other explanatory material), and be written in coherent, readable English. These additional pages should provide more details of how the nominee satisfies the evaluation criteria. The evaluation questions used by the Selection Subcommittee may be used as a guide for the structure and content of this supplementary material.