Composure Flashcards
List a time when you were faced with an emergency situation. How did you organize your plans and what steps did you take?
Composure. To stay calm, poised, and effective in stressful or difficult situations; to think on one’s feet, adjusting quickly to changing situations; to maintain self-control.
Situation: Hurricane Sandy early Nov 2012 - 10 resources scheduled onsite for last push of work before Thanksgiving/Christmas/New years break
Task: I was stressed because my project plan was at risk = kept my composure. Team had key meetings scheduled. Onsite work to be done. Team had deadlines and quarterly bonus to earn. Understandable but a setback if we had canceled work that week.
Action: I came up with a plan to let those who were comfortable to travel, to travel, with me organizing and scheduling events and reworking the master plan to maximize onsite time. I presented the plan and risks to my supervisor and then the team for their buy-in and let them know that those who were worried or didn’t want to, could work remotely. I then tracked the flights of those traveling that week and scheduled daily calls and provided remote support and logistics (which public transportation was open, etc.), I reserved rooms at a single hotel for everyone, made sure hotspot and extra battery packs.
Result: incredible! 1/2 team ended up traveling and no one was injured. The customer was ecstatic that we still delivered on time. The team grew closer together through this difficult time.
Lesson: going above and beyond to come up with organized plans and following through on them, adjusting where necessary is a great way to ensure success!
Describe a time you feel you were treated unfairly and how you dealt with it.
Composure. To stay calm, poised, and effective in stressful or difficult situations; to think on one’s feet, adjusting quickly to changing situations; to maintain self-control.
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Describe a time when your workload seemed overwhelming and you felt that you had more work to do than time allowed.
Composure. To stay calm, poised, and effective in stressful or difficult situations; to think on one’s feet, adjusting quickly to changing situations; to maintain self-control.
“Situation: Our QA cycle happens about once every three months and is very time consuming.
Task: Normally I am responsible for Support and keeping QA team working on projects. When QA starts, all focus shifts from Support to very heavy QA - all spare time goes to this to get it out the door! Usually we have all test cases written but not before we started 1.39!
Pre-Action: I strategized with Erika on how she should prioritize tickets and that she would send me a message when certain messages needed attention before the next week.
Action: I took the dozen or so test case we had to write and organized them in snow-ball fashion. Easiest to hardest. I then wrote the outline for the easiest ones first so that I could enlist the help of a senior tester to starting writing the detailed test case. When finished, I reviewed and then added the test case to the sprint.
Result: QA went longer then management had hoped for BUT the test cases were written before the team was waiting on these test cases.
Lesson: Ideally we need to make time before testing to write test cases. “
Describe a time when you were faced with a stressful situation that demonstrated your coping skills.
Composure. To stay calm, poised, and effective in stressful or difficult situations; to think on one’s feet, adjusting quickly to changing situations; to maintain self-control.
“Situation: We were under contract on a dream house in a great location with great schools that was on 12 acres BUT through 4 different inspections (because we aren’t experts) the inspectors found it had some significant issues.
Task: Knowing which issues we should demand the owners take care of or those that we would inherit was stressful.
Action: We enlisted the help of a realtor to guide us through the decision making. Many ““normal wear and tear”” issues come with a house and property but we were dealing with termites in the barn, pool that was near end of life for many components, roofing slope issues, septic that was very old and couldn’t be found, etc. These were major issues but we needed to be able to understand how big of a deal some of these issues were. And if asked, would be willing to take money off the purchase of the house to cover them? So I came up with estimates of the major issues of what it would cost to fix each issue (with a low and a high estimate).
Result: My wife and I ended up using the estimates and input from our realtor to decide ahead of the final negitation how flexibile and what adjustments we were willing to take.
Lesson: get experienced help with stressful situations. Sometimes an outside perspective can help you navigate the forest from the trees. Also be willing to own the decision and do your own research and analysis to help with the decision making process.”
Tell me about a recent situation in which you had to deal with a very upset customer or co-worker.
Composure. To stay calm, poised, and effective in stressful or difficult situations; to think on one’s feet, adjusting quickly to changing situations; to maintain self-control.
“Situation: I was reutnring support calls and spoke with one very angry customer.
Task: What they were angry about was not something I could fix. We had changed our pricing and sent the customer notice of the change 3 different times (3 months, 2 months, and 30 days before the change).
Action: I mostly listened and took notes. I was empathetic and told them I understood and that further, I was sorry they hadn’t received a call back from our company despite leaving several messages.
Result: they said they wanted to discontinue their service. On a previous call like this I had asked my boss if there was any chance we would want to give a client a credit to help with the first couple of months but was told no, we knew we were going to lose some clients.
Lesson: sometime there is no good outcome and the best thing you can do is listen, take notes, akcknowledge, and emphatize and apologize (where appropriate).”
