Deliver Results Flashcards
Leaders focus on the key inputs for their business and deliver them with the right quality and in a timely fashion. Despite setbacks, they rise to the occasion and never settle.
Tell me about a time when you were leading a group, were assigned a goal, and did not reach it.
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working as a software engineer in a bank for a Financial Advisory group and managed an advisory account. These Financial Advisory group executives used to manage a multi million dollar portfolio for the customers. This is a retail and investment management and advisory solution. Its multi billion dollar company is US based and they have global business. I was working on the team which was helping the bank to bring more business.
I was assigned a project where my on-site coordinator created a high and low level technical document and asked me to implement the project within 6 months of time. I was working with one of my junior colleagues. The requirement was to load all customer’s details, their portfolios and the accounts under portfolios. It was a nested grid that I was supposed to make.
Task
I had to deliver the working project on time
Actions
I started working on this project. I had been training my team on jquery therefore,I had knowle event on jquery table that I implemented to solve this problem
However, while bringing 100 records it used to take more than a minute I asked my onsite coordinator about this and even my QA were not worried.
Project was completed and when it got deployed it failed since in stages we had 1000s of rows to render and the site was not responding at all.
Results
The project delivery goal was not achieved and we had very bad days.
I then email directly to end users and tried to understand if they want all nested grids to be loaded up front? Finally, I realized they did not want a nested grid and they were okay by doing on demand dialogs. Finally I took extra time to rework and deliver the working solution.
I learnt my lesson that whenever I am working on a project with a customer then I will always test the project with real production data to make sure that project meets the actual business scenario.
Tell me about a time where you not only met a goal but considerably exceeded expectations.
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working with one of my education domain customers. My role was development team lead. I was assigned a project where I had to solve state problems and keep history so that users can go back and forward. In order to solve that issue I had to utilize a new framework that I had been learning on my own in the past.
Task
I decided to deliver this challenging project with good quality and on time.
Actions
I have been working on an ngrx open source project as a contributor. I used this framework to solve the state management issue
I was able to deliver a predictable state driven application and I also came up with a new marble diagram concept to write tests for time driven api.
I also trained my entire team on this technology. I found there were no courses outside. Therefore, I also auditioned in pluralsight for my first new course and got selected. I authored a new course in pluralsight as well.
Results
The project became a grand success. Business never had any major bugs or issues.
My course on pluralsight become popular and I became known author
My company’s development team and product owners gave me appreciation in a retrospective meeting.
I became part of the hiring and training team in my company.
Tell me about a time where you did not effectively manage your project, and something did not get completed on time?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was a software developer and I got a project to work on new features and was timed to deliver within 6 month duration. I had to load the testlet with a new design given by the business.
The testlet has 36 questions and many peripheral stuff with tools like calculator, excel, overview, timer etc.
Task
I decided to work on and deliver on time
Actions
I started working on the peripheral part of the testlet and got many unknown issues that took larger portion of my time
Also maximum time were spent with the new team that I was given to me to train them while working on this story
I then started working on the testlet however was not able to finish the testlet full rendering on time. Could not deliver to customers as well.
Results
I had to ask for extra time to finish this story.
I learnt my lesson to inform business or VP of software development in case any time I see there is risk to project delivery.
I applied this learning in my next authlit project and saved that project from being undelivered
Tell me about a time you had significant, unanticipated obstacles to overcome in achieving a key goal. Were you eventually successful?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was a senior architect and we were moving our projects to the cloud. Our customer had 13 system lift and shift and another 1 system re-architect. The key goal was to come up with scalable and resilient architecture. I had done composed UI in my past so I was able to deliver this work.
Task
I decided to work on this and use some of native cloud features to deliver scalable architecture.
Actions
I created Azure functions ( lambda functions in AWS) for various microservices. Each function used to communicate within workload I was using messaging to keep them isolated. Project got delivered and worked well.
However, we started seeing issues where end users used to overwrite each other’s changes because of lack of versioning in the data layer. This unexpected issue started coming. This was a key challenge and it had a huge impact on business like authors used to lose their changes. Business needs to pay $1000 to each author and it is getting lost.
It was independent of scalable services and therefore, maintaining the version was critical. I enabled the version check in our entity layer however that made our application more sensitive to not work many times.
Therefore, I proposed to refresh the UI when an update happens by another person. Also I suggested that customers show a notification message if some author is working saying that someone modified this item please take their changes and then apply your changes.
Results
This version check and UI refresh or notification idea worked well and now the entire application is built on this fundamental correction.
Authors are able to save their changes and notify incase of other people’s changes therefore, protecting their and other data loss with this feature.
Tell me about a time when you were able to remove a serious roadblock/barrier preventing your team from making progress? How were you able to remove the barrier? What was the outcome?
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was working with one of my customers in the education domain (AICPA). We had a team with 2 members and the project was at risk since the other team member was left and only one person was running that project. They had critical roadblock of one technology that the person was not aware of and the project deadline arrived.
Task
I decided to help this team to deliver their project
Actions
I was aware of this situation. I spoke to my company’s president and had a meeting with their team. I realized that they had issues with silverlight technology.
In My past I had done many projects on silverlight so I was able to work with them 1 day and 1 full night.
After the next 2 days I was able to make that project successful and delivered it by fixing all of their major roadblocks.
Result
The project went on live.
Company saved that client and extended their SOW for the next 1 year successfully.
My CEO and president were very impressed with me and they praised me at the next annual ceremony.
Tell me about a time when you were more than half-way and realized it was the wrong goal.
Situation
This goes back to the time when I was a software developer and customers were evaluating spreadsheet products. In the AICPA exam we have spreadsheets that candidates use to do calculation and other spread related work. I was given one story to implement one of the competitive spreadsheets that customers agreed upon.
Task
I decided to give them working integration of spreadsheets with driver software.
Actions
I spent my maximum time writing code around the 3rd party spreadsheet library to make it more compatible with our components. I was almost there to integrate that to our workload.
Then halfway my customer came up with a new 3rd party spreadsheet library and wanted me to focus on that and integrate. I was given the same amount of time.
I realized that if I would have not written maximum code on 3rd party rather would have developed abstraction in my own exam code to decouple 3rd party spreadsheet then I could have utilized that code with this new spreadsheet.
Result
Finally I had to re-work on all the api that I developed. This time I created one abstraction layer in our code and it was ready for future integration to other 3rd party libraries as well.
