Problem Solving in Manila – Persistence - Christina Ng

Our Deutsche Bank’s facility management project in Manila is very big. It occupies three buildings and has a very large footprint. It also requires a large pool of dedicated resources.

The setting up process is led by our Colliers FM team from Jakarta, working closely with our Colliers International office in Manila. We started the project in December 2008 under a very tight time frame for the transition/setting up. We practically took over the project from the incumbent party in only two weeks. Some people call that suicidal, but we call it a success.

Christina Ng, our Associate Director played a very important role in training all the new and existing staff assigned to the project. She is also involved in monitoring the progress of the project during and after the setting up process.

There are still some loose ends in the project as we observed. The project requires a senior person to examine the problems and the possible solutions. We then decided to send Christina back to Manila to handle this problem-solving.

Christina spent about two months in Manila. It sounds simple, but it was really not. She had to leave everything behind in Jakarta for this and was practically alone overseas. Yet she had a huge task to do.

Christina was equipped with Colliers FM Root Cause Analysis, a method innovated in Jakarta to systematically identify a problem, its root cause, the potential strategy to solve it and a way to track the follow-up. She diligently implemented the method. This, of course, was not as easy as it seems. There were challenges and a certain level of difficulty facing her, bearing in mind that this is a very large project and involved so many stakeholders. It required a lot of persistence. She also needed to ‘manage’ senior level management from Colliers International’s own management, as well as the client.

At the end, Christina successfully completed this task. The Asia Pacific Corporate Real Estates and Services of Deutsche Bank AG was impressed with Christina.