:AACE CERTIFICATION 2009-2010:

After 1 week of intensive training, I feel I have learn so much new things about project management. I head back to office with mind full of ideas on how to improve and what I could use on the new knowledge that I have learn on project management onto my projects. But when Monday comes, when I am buried by all the out-standing work that has pile up and the meetings that were scheduled, I could only think of how to juggle work, personnel life and now with another long list of assignments that needs to be done every week.

Nevertheless as I started working on a new pre-sales project, we did most of what is required in our Sales Process including a Risk Management Exercise. I can remember we have done this many times and we know exactly what needs to be done, but all these time, we had a excel template with us as we go through the risk assessments, filling in the best case, worst case and most likely factor before mitigation and after mitigation. And with a template guiding us, we only need to know what is the result value generated and never did we wonder how this value is calculated.

(above screen shot captured from a excel spreadsheet, risk tools used by all CPM in my organisation)

This time as I was filling up the cells with figures and numbers as usual, I started to link what I have learned last week to what this spreadsheet does. With the sale person's direction and some historical experiences, risks are classified and mitigated in-terms of cost, time and quality. I'm able to better identify each risk's impact with the Risk Impact Matrix. With all the inputs from the team, we start to see the risk mitigation cost, something that never cross my mind, this time I have put in a little more detail and effort to look for all the cells and its formula in it. Not that I should be surprise, but I was rather glad to find the Nominal Group (Delphi) Technique and the familiar formula using PERT calculation of Mean, Std Dev, Variance and Sigma from the Best Case, Worst Case and Most Likely figures.

With the figures clearing shown as the output, its another round of discussion and justification with the Sales why this price have to be included bring up the sales price. Yet another statement from Dr. Paul D. Giammalvo strike my mind, he mentioned that all risk that owner try to transfer to contractor will become a sales figure that is given back to them, how true and real life example that would be.

This is just part of the effort in the preparation tender within pre-sales process, more work is following up .........