Can you tell me about a program you managed that performed poorly?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

I was a TPM in an insurance form overseeing data analytics projects in the
different insurance businesses. Projects included Medical Insurance business,
Asset Management Business and General insurance business. Each project had a
project manager and data engineers working together on the same server
concurrently. 
The project was a 3 month project and each team had deliverables in different
timelines. Although each team worked on different databases, the databases were
all sitting on the same warehouse which was hosted in an on premise server.
after some weeks into the project, I realized that the server was often slow and
this was slowing down deliverables from each team. I therefore performed a root
cause analysis using the 5 why's method and reached to the conclusion that the
network was overloaded by the concurrent access by all the data engineers from
the different teams. This was causing delays in the set project milestones and
the overall performance of the program was not looking good. I called upon the
stakeholders and the project managers to discuss this issue and proposed a
solution to move the server to cloud, for us to be able to deliver the end goal
in time and improve efficiency. Further, I worked with the procurement team to
compile favorable cloud solutions and plans we could use and finally managed to
secure one that was scalable on demand. This solved the problem , albeit
delaying the program with two weeks.

Anonymous · Answer

One time I had to face a situation wherein the project was not performing well
due to resource shortage. I took the initiative to reach out to the upper
management to arrange the right resources for my team to complete the project on
time. I also arranged individual meetings to understand the challenges faced by
team and sorted them out.

Anonymous · Answer

Situation: working on a program that was tied to a marketing event, so on-time
delivery was key.

Task/problem: 2 months before event, engineering budget was cut, developers
re-assigned to another project. Shipping on-time with the same scope was
impossible.

Action: Met with stakeholders to evaluation options. After analyzing available
budget and remaining work, identified two options - either releasing with
further reduced scope, or changing the announcement at the event to that of a
private preview of the product. After presenting my analysis and
recommendations, the product and marketing teams agreed that announcing a
private preview of the product was the best course of action.  Reviewed
decisions with wider stakeholder team, got sign off.

Result: Feature was announced at event as a private preview, and public preview
was released a quarter late.

Anonymous · Answer

Situation: working on a program that was tied to a marketing event, so on-time
delivery was key.

Task/problem: 2 months before event, engineering budget was cut, developers
re-assigned to another project. Shipping on-time with the same scope was
impossible.

Action: Met with stakeholders to evaluation options. After analyzing available
budget and remaining work, identified two options - either releasing with
further reduced scope, or changing the announcement at the event to that of a
private preview of the product. Product and marketing opted for the latter.
Reviewed decisions with wider stakeholder team, got sign off.

Result: Feature was announced at event as a private preview, and public preview
was released a quarter late.

Anonymous · Answer

In projects associated with infrastructure there is usually a common point of
decline close to the end of the program.
When working on Flutter Infrastructure I found that managers, technical program
managers and product managers get excited during the project planning and
software engineers get excited during the design and implementation phases of
the program. However there was a decline in the velocity and enthusiasm during
the migration and the deprecation of old systems. This is because these phases
require careful planning, a lot of communication and coordination. I have
managed this situation with my teams with clear and open communication that a
project is completed only after the data and production workflows have been
fully migrated and the old systems are being phased out. Having this clearly
defined as part of the program plan not only simplifies execution and
communication but it also helps collecting the details required for the program
retrospective and the program closure.

Anonymous · Answer

there was a drop in the quality of the documents. i understood the problem was
that the two teams were merged due to organisation restructuring plans. the new
members didn't get enough time to understand the possible nuances in the
documents. I asked old members to conduct best practices sessions and there was
a good discussion and so many things were clear. Sometimes we do things so often
that we forget why are we doing it. for sometime but the quality was affected

Can you tell me about a program you managed that performed poorly?

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