The National Operations Center of Excellence’s second annual Transportation Systems Management and Operations or TSMO awards competition is now open for entries, with October 11 at midnight the deadline for submissions. For more information on the awards and how to submit an entry, visit https://transportationops.org/tsmoaward.

[Above photo left to right: NOCoE’s Patrick Son; Brent Cain, accepting a 2019 TSMO award for the Arizona DOT; and AASHTO’s Jim Tymon.]

The NOCoE TSMO awards are open to any city, county, state department of transportation, metropolitan planning organization, regional planning organization, council of government, and private sector organizations. Entries should highlight successful TSMO projects undertaken within the last five years that have provided a clear benefit to the traveling public.

“The strategies we saw last year were inventive and really impactful,” noted Patrick Son, NOCoE’s managing director, in a statement. “As a relatively recently defined discipline, publicizing and sharing the best TSMO ideas is crucial to the growth of our industry and its workforce. At NOCoE, we’re committed to advancing these concepts.”

[The video below showcases the winners of the first NOCoE TSMO awards competition.]

For the 2020 TSMO contest, NOCoE said it modified the competition’s categories slightly to better reflect different aspects of the TSMO industry. Judges will select a winner and runner up from the following: Best TSMO Project (Creative Solution); Agency Improvement: Use of Capability Maturity; TSMO Workforce Development; and Best Use of Management of Data to Improve TSMO.

Each category winner’s designee will receive round-trip travel to attend the 2020 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. At that meeting, a NOCoE Gold Medal honoree will be selected as the overall victor from among the four category winners and will be recognized as the best TSMO project for the 2020 award season.

Additionally, one individual will be honored with the annual TSMO Champion Award – a selection based on that person’s work in advancing TSMO and changing the way people and organizations think about transportation.