Tell us about a time you failed to reach a goal.

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

In my early days as Program Manager, I managed a project for one of our main
customers. This project had a very tight schedule and I promised to deliver the
first EVT samples in 3 months.
It was my responsibility to ensure everything would be completed on time, and
achieve the quality standards defined by the program and inside the budget
approved by leadership.
Unfortunately… when I started to deep dive into the project and analyze all the
technical details, I realized that it was not possible to get the prototypes
ready on time. I missed the deadline by 2 weeks. I felt bad at that time because
I failed, so I immediately started to work on a new feasible schedule trying to
mitigate the problem. In addition, I arranged a daily opening and closing
meeting with the core team to monitor all activities. The root cause of the
problem was a delay in some component's delivery and I also ignored one of the
Reliability tests defined by Engineering.
So I highlighted the problem to my manager and I shared with him my new plan. I
explained the situation to him and I shared the new timeline that I could meet.
Then we worked together to commit to the new delivery date. So I learned a lot
from that situation, now I’m always adding some buffer to my project schedules
and I work more closely with core team members. But the most important learning
was, how important is to be honest and raise your hand on time if something goes
wrong.

Anonymous · Answer

There was a time in my previous organization, where post re-org my new
leadership assigned me one project where the ask was to build the automation
framework of compliance control assessments, and the compliance we need to cover
was the custom compliance by company named "Enterprise Grade" and for this
compliance we have been told to cover minimum 5 major control to automate.
Though the area was new to me and my team as we haven't work on this control
assessment work before in our past career, but we accepted it along with set
deadlines.
Soon I began the data gathering to formulate the delivery and started my Team's
training on understanding the domain before working on actual task. I found out
one the critical control which is around encryption control was quite vague to
cover, upon more digging I found the data was not present to assess it properly,
I setup various meeting with encryption team's senior architects, Sr EM and
product manager as they were the owner of this actual control but they also told
the same that with the vague description of control they can't commit to provide
data in defined timeline, I recorded all these data and prepared the risk plan
with the mitigation.
I presented this plan and highlighted the risk to my leadership, initially they
seems concerned over not covering the critical control in that release timeline
but upon describing the root cause issue and the mitigation plan which was to
compensate this control with another 2 control they seems very satisfied.
I got a go ahead from my leadership and at the end of quarter we were able to
deliver 6 control by building the assessment automation framework from scratch
and delivered more controls than committed. And also proposed the timeline for
encryption plan. Leadership appreciated the timely risk mitigation and on time
delivery.

Tell us about a time you failed to reach a goal.

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