Alessandra Mokarzel Ricotta was born in Itajubá, in the state of Minas Gerais, and she has always liked working since she was a young girl. When she was 10 years old, she started selling chocolates in some shops in the city together with her two older sisters. On Saturdays, she used to help her father serve customers at the pharmacy where he was a (business partner). At a very young age she learned how to treat customers and to be responsible with numbers.

In 2001, she started the Mechanical Production Engineering course at UNIFEI, Federal University of Itajubá, and managed to combine her course with her work in the pharmacy and some internships, in addition to a scientific initiation project.

In April 2006, when she had already graduated, she started her capital projects career, working as a contractual manager of HPP Mascarenhas de Moraes, where she was employed for 4 years and had her first contact with a claim, mainly due to schedule delays.

In 2010, in the Simplício Hydroelectric Power Plant construction, in Sapucaia/RJ, when she received many claims from different origins and began to see all the consequences of the lack of specific details in the bid, as well as the importance of all the records made throughout the entire period of contract, to subsidize the claims defense – and even accepting the claims.

In 2012, she had a new experience, working as a consultant at a company in Belo Horizonte, participating in audits and management of national and international projects.

At the end of 2013, she had the opportunity to work in a large construction company, and implemented proactive contractual administration routines, through the evidence search and creation related to client deviations in the project execution. In addition, she participated in a contract renegotiation study, and she had to recalculate many contract unit prices and used various cost concepts. Without agreement in the negotiations, the project was paralyzed, and Alessandra decided to fulfill an old dream, opening a restaurant.

She managed it for 2 years, calculating the products unit costs and the indirect costs in order to set the selling price, as well as personally serving the customers, which was her favorite part! During this time, she gave birth to her daughter and decided to return to capital projects. She restarted her journey in São Paulo, at North Rodoanel, unfortunately paralyzed a few months later. She stayed on the project for another year, calculating the volumes effectively executed, and was demobilized.

With an “unscheduled break” in her career, she dedicated herself to PMP certification and participated in the AACE Annual Meeting in 2019, at which time she identified herself a lot with the speakers and reconnected with contract management. She verified the still great deficiency of evidence generated during the contract and decided to open her own consulting company, specializing in contract management.

She worked as a technical assistant in legal proceedings, using several AACE Recommended Practices in her analysis and saw firsthand the lengthy and onerous nature of these disputes.

She has also been working on one of the largest hydroelectric plant modernization projects in Latin America for almost two years, at UHE’s Ilha Solteira and Jupiá, disseminating good practices in contract management and participating in several studies related to the project.

She defends the role of the contract management from the bidding stage and strongly believes in collaborative contracts. Alessandra dreams of working on a project in which all parties assume their responsibilities for deviations caused in the project and use contract management as a tool to ensure the maintenance of the economic-financial balance of the contract and not to cover budget errors or executive inefficiencies.

In 2021, she joined the Brazil Section and since then she has had the opportunity to learn and disseminate her knowledge, in the constant search for justice and win-win relationships in contracts.