Tell us about a time you failed to achieve 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.

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

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