In the morning session of November 8, 2025 around 09:00 Philippines time, the facilitator started to have a conversation with the class by asking each of us about the update on the industry analysis as part of his requirement to pass the subject. He started asking about Project Scope Management, secondly the Cost Management and Project Time Management. I myself was assigned to Project Risk Management and was not able to provide an update because the facilitator stopped asking, perhaps not satisfied with the answer provided initially and thinking others had the same update. The facilitator reminded us that we have to know the theory about the assigned knowledge areas, do our research to understand it. With this understanding, we can begin formulating questions to the client whether the framework or process of the theory is being applied in real life. To be honest I am ready on that day, with my slides presentation about Risk Management, however I felt that my preparation work is not sufficient because my understanding of Risk Management on that day is not that deep compared now. So after that day, I continue researching and grab the opportunity of being connected or an employee of the company, asking questions about the ISO, frameworks and processes. I continued reading the PMBOK guide and watched tutorials on the internet to deepen my understanding about Risk Management. These efforts made me think that Risk Management is one big area of the Project Management knowledge areas. It covers everything not only in projects but also in operational aspects. The client itself has its own risk management team which they called Operational Risk Management, technical risk is under this big umbrella. Procurement, Human Resources risks are under this too. It is a mind blowing knowledge that I started loving. I always hear the term risk appetite, likelihood to happen, risk level and a lot more on every call I have with them.
Actually I am also using those terms in my daily life now, appreciating how important risk management is.
The Facilitator began discussing the Project Triple Constraint. A project is bound or constrained by three elements: Cost, Scope and Time whereas Quality sits in the middle of the triangle. This area causes a lot of confusion at first, especially if you are not seriously studying these terms.
These constraints are typically where the changes are introduced. The key is to balance these constraints throughout the entire project. It’s an iterative process because changes are going to and do occur throughout the project. The objective of a project manager is to complete the scope of work in the client’s budget, in the correct amount of time. Considering these three elements, a constraint is important. Let say there are five people working on a call center built before it operates on January 30 of 2026. The Chief Technical Officer may then realize that their clients will arrive on the 21st of January 2026 and decide to make the call center operational on the January 15th of 2026. In this situation, we need to adjust one or both of the other elements to accommodate this shortened timeline. We can add more resources in the form of more people working to help to accelerate the process or build. This will definitely affect the overall cost of the project, because obviously you have to pay more people to complete the job.
Another thing is we can limit the links of the call center build, let say we can run it only with a single Internet Service Provider, however before making a decision, we should keep an eye on the quality of the work. Imagine this single Internet link goes down, what will happen to the entire production of the call center site? Definitely a loss of revenue! Will the operations accept the risk of having a link failure of this single internet or stick with dual internet links with different providers, 1 will act as primary and 2nd link will act as backup? Will the new resource be able to
speed up the build or it can make confusion to other engineers working on the project? As quality is subjective, these kinds of questions are what a project manager has to always consider during conversations with stakeholders and clients.
To understand Project Risk Management, you need to understand what is a risk. Risk defined as uncertainty that can affect the outcome. It is therefore something that can happen and the consequences could be either good or bad. Typically we talk about opportunities for risks with positive outcomes and threats for risks which have negative outcomes. Risk management is the process of managing that uncertainty and controlling the impact of the risk on your project. It covers the operational, financial, reputational, etc. The pattern here is that all these disciplines are avoiding the manifestation of a problem through Risk Management. Furthermore, risks are everywhere. Risks can happen in Integration management, Scope management, Schedule management, Cost management, quality management, resource management, communication management, procurement management and others. In our recent interview with the project manager of the client, the risks are monitored project-by-project, at least within the project.
There could be other risk driven by the weather. In the Philippines we have rainy seasons, Typhoons that may affect the connectivity of the call center sites. This is one thing that we manage risk on this framework and what we might be doing on ongoing operational risk. The Risk Management framework is pretty based on probability and the impact. If anything that we are currently using in terms of technology that is out-of-support, technologies that needs to be replaced, anything that may hinder/stop or reduce the effectiveness of the operations.
Now let’s talk about Quality. Quality is an essential or distinctive characteristic, property or attribute, character or nature, as belonging to or distinguishing a thing. It’s the totality of an entity that bears on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs. The totality of an entity is everything about this product or service that bears on its ability. So the ability of that thing to perform to deliver its value, its purpose. To meet stated, that would be our requirements or implied needs. We get into those non-functional requirements. The stability, security and usability are part of quality. Quality in projects aligned with value, with scope and priorities. When we talk about the value, we answer the question of why? Why is this project being done? What is the reason, what is the thing, that desired future state that our project will create. The business value is tied directly to quality. If we create a project and that product, the thing that we create does not satisfy the reason why, do we really have business value? So we have to understand why the project is being done first. Then we have the scope. That quality is a conformance to requirements. So we need a clearly defined scope and an understanding of what that desired future state should look like. We have the priorities, priorities are the shifting goals, the shifting objectives that our different stakeholders have. So we think about people in different departments or how they use the thing that we create. Or different lines of business. They have different priorities about the thing that we are creating, about that desired future state. So we have to look at quality from the perspective of all of our different stakeholders. And yes some stakeholders are more important than others. Quality needs to be really defined. We can’t let it be interpreted. So we want to stay away from subjective terminologies like fast and good, and reliable. How do you quantify well what is fast? What is good? What is reliable? So we are talking about really nailing down the requirements so that we can conform to those
requirements. And what are the features and functions that will affect its ability to satisfy stated and implied needs? Sometimes people mistake quality and grade. Grade is ranking or a classification of a good or a service. What I think is learning and understanding Scope, Time and Cost, the Triple Constraints wherein the results is Quality will make you love Project Management. Adding up the Risk management, wherein a big topic to discuss with, will greatly improve the interest of learning this subject.
The other topic of the knowledge areas that interest me is the project procurement management. I have discovered that the project procurement management processes are plan procurement management falls under planning, conduct procurements is under executing and control procurement which is under monitoring and control of the project life cycle. Once you know a lot of these items that we can see on integration, scope, schedule, cost, quality, resource and communications maybe we want someone else to do the work or maybe hire 3rd party to do these works thus forming a contract to the vendor. During our interview with one of the procurement team of the client, also with my classmates assigned on the project procurement team, the purchase order is confidential, and cannot be disclosed to other suppliers telling them the services and price of the product. The client can only choose 1 supplier per product or services being offered, its business competition. Once the client chose their vendor, they will be signing a contract listing the terms of agreement like you deliver this product to us for 2 weeks and afterwards we will pay you for 30 days, depends on the agreement, it can be that the payment will be paid after 60 days if the product is delivered to the client for a month and so. Another term is that if the product gets damaged from the manufacturer side, the warranty falls to them. A lot of legal things are happening to the client and the manufacturer that makes procurement complex. There is a lot more happening in this process and what I have shared is only a few.
The facilitator re-iterated about the project life cycle. There is a project initiation wherein the project manager will receive a project request. He or she must document the purpose and identify the scope of the project by establishing the contributors, stakeholder or the people who are needed to complete this project. It is where we build the initial estimates, obtain approval of the required definition and establish initial priority and timetable. Afterwards, the project initiation phase comes in. We gather and document the processes, internal control requirements, search for purchasable items, opportunities and requirements. We should think about the scalability, flexibility, and of course we have to set the limitation. Another thing we need to consider is to identify the cost to implement the project and implement a solution on it. Within this process, an established timetable must be presented to provide forecasts about the progress of the project. In the case of our client, one of the good examples of the project is building call center sites.
Part of implementation of this build are server room physical set-up, point-to-point links between existing site and new site, site internet circuit setup, British Telecom MPLS circuit setup, client link setup, site-to-site VPN set, migration of services like system migration, site-to-site VPN migration, remote access (client) VPN Migration, client link migration – client1, VLAN / campaign migration, move access switches and replace old switches used for migration on new site, migration of DMZ switches from old site to new site, migration of server switches from old site to new site, migration of firewalls from old site to new site, migration of British Telecom MPLS from
old site to new site, migration of core switches from old site to new site, migration of connectivity to satellite offices using point-to-point link and a lot more depending on the scope of the project. After the implementation the documentation and monitoring phase comes in wherein evaluation of the effectiveness of the system, testing with customers, workstation testing and documentation took place. And lastly the Project closure phase wherein we finally close the project after all failover testing of network, systems, workstations, telephony are already completed.
A lot of discussions are indeed interesting and all of this occurs only on the 1st 3 hours of the morning session. We took our lunch for an hour and came back to the room for another set of discussion that focuses on Research.