:AACE CERTIFICATION 2009-2010:

"Work Team is defined as a group of people who have the shared responsibility to produce a specific end product or to provide a specific service which has been previously authorized." -- from Project Management Using Earned Value by Humphreys & Associates Chapter 5.

In the last blog I mentioned about the pre-sales activity that I am currently engaged in, and did my risk mitigation then. This week as I was reading the Humphreys' Project management Using Earned Value, I came across this topic Work Teams, which relates perfectly to the position that I'm in now. When the sales opportunity came, I was assigned to this project team to work on the tender proposal, and the members comprise mainly of people from sales, key account manager (KAM), solution architect (SA) and myself as customer project manager (CPM). We are all from different units with totally different knowledge, strength and even focus but are put together to form a team to work together towards the same target. Once, all of us used to work individually with minimum or even no communications, but now that we are in the same project team, we meet almost everyday for clarification, discussion and idea sharing on how to balance cost, time efficient and work effectiveness; which is always a conflict between KAM and CPM, as there is always only 2 out of 3 choice; good, cheap and fast:
- To have quality and fast service, it does not comes cheap. ,
- To have quality and cheap service, it will not be fast,
- To have fast and cheap service, there will not be quality
May it be project sponsor or even at steering comm level, someone will have to make the decision what is important and which choice to take.

The amazing thing about the "Work Team" is that once these few members from different areas and different units are put in the same room working on the same topic, we start to learn what others thinks and have a different view on each other's perspective as we understand how other member look at the same issue that you are looking at and suddenly when you think there could only be a solution to a problem, it appears that a problem will have multiple solution depending on which aspect you are looking from.

Building a matrix combining a project organization chart, also known as Organization Breakdown Structure (OBS) and Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) clearly list out what needs to be done and who will be doing it. Although Work Team members function as a team and helps one another with advise and problem solving, there is still a need for responsibility and accountability for each task to be perform and completed. It could be concluded that the success of a project team according to McKinsey Consulting Findings on Strategy lies on the followings:

- Direction: Meaningful Vision
- Performance: Culture based on Trust
- Accountability: Clear Goals and Authority to meet them
(Above information reference to Dr Paul D. Giammalvo's AACE Certification Prep Course Day 1 training handouts)

Relating to this, it bring up the challenge that we could be facing now in the AACE project team. could be distance that tear us apart, could be individual work load that came in as the obsticle, but I think after 2 weeks back in our own country everyone should have settled down like I did. Last 2 weeks was just nightmare, that is the payback for not being around for a whole week in office. My appology to the team members for submitting my report late last week. And thanks to the full support that my team members has shown me, I can say I have done much better this week. And also a word of advise to myself and all the rest of the team members, lets show each other some accountabliltiy, build our friendship with trust that requires only a little effort but knowing that we will gain much more after that.