Describe a major problem or setback in a project of yours and how did you overcome it?

Question

Anonymous · Accepted Answer

In a recent project, I led a collaborative effort with a test team and Customer
team of releasing latest feature support document. We encountered a disagreement
about the feature mapping support shared by our test team with my leads and used
by our respective global teams. The other lead on the test team on the project
preferred their team's existing standards, while I believed aligning with our
project's standards would improve consistency and ease collaboration across both
teams. To resolve the disagreement, I scheduled a meeting with global teams to
discuss the situation and understand the reasoning behind each team's preferred
approach. During the meeting, I emphasized the importance of standards for
maintaining quality and meeting the deadline to release customer timeline of
this the project. We collaboratively reviewed both sets of standards and merged
the best practices from each to create a unified set of guidelines for the
project. This process involved actively listening to the other engineer's
perspective and respectful dialogue between the teams. By reaching a consensus
on the unified agreement, we were able to enhance collaboration and improve
quality across the entire project. This experience highlighted the significance
of effective communication while working with remote teams and managing
cross-cultural differences

Anonymous · Answer

The software supply chain security improvements for Dart  & Flutter required
generating a signed bill of materials for every artifact shipped to final users.
Even though the complexity of the implementation relied on proper isolation of
the build process from the process of collecting the bill of materials and
providing a remote signed workflow a setback came from the most unexpected
place.
The project to protect the software supply chain was already completed and the
final step in the release workflow of the feature required publishing a public
key so that the final customer could validate the signature. However, being the
first Google open source project implementing a software supply chain I didn’t
account for the complexity of releasing the public key associated with the
Google signing key. Solving this problem required a lot of negotiation with
security teams at the Google organization level.
It was frustrating that everything else was completed and the only thing missing
was releasing a key. However because the processes associated with that key was
making Google accountable for the artifacts signed with the associated private
key. The security and legal teams wanted to be extra careful before releasing
it. I had to provide documentation and support for a few extra audits before the
key was finally released after a couple of months of negotiations and
collaboration with security and legal teams.

Anonymous · Answer

Due to Government Regulatory changes, we had to collect GST from the domestic
learners who were earlier bypassing it if they are enrolled for an intl Non-GST
program.
The ticket size being $3000 and the learner base of 10000.
Now communicating this regulatory change becomes a reputation risk as well as
revenue risk for the company as the learners were already promised a fees before
enrolling for the program and it might come across to them as we are demanding
more money than promised.
I took the onus to fetch the data of all domestic learners and coordinated with
other operations team members to inform the learners about the regulatory
changes and that they have to comply to it by paying the entire fees before the
end of 30th Sep failing which they will have to pay 18% GST additional on their
fees.
I was able to recover 90% of the payments from the learners through constant
communication, rigorous follow-ups and maintaining data.

Anonymous · Answer

As a TPM, I was working on understanding and defining the KPI for a program with
the leadership. I was new and this program fell under my purview but before
indulging into it, I wanted to understand the scope and what would success look
like to this program, so I had set up a call with leadership on understanding
the success metrics for the program. And soon we all realized there was no
defined success metrics or any pre-identified metrics as such for this program.
I brought up the data, like before I took up this program how the data like from
what resources the data was collected and who all had visibility. It turned out
the visibility to the leadership was less and also data was not accurate as it
was coming from Jira. I suggested that instead of a manual sync of data from a
third party software why don't we automate this like a cronjob that runs
everyday at some time of the day and leadership agreed as I mentioned I would
take this data and build a dashboard clearly stating who was the org leader and
what was the current status of the project and what's the ETA and if there was
any initial review on design conducted then what was the major AI and what
actions were taken, who was the lead engineer and who were the engineers who
reviewed this design. I planned on automating this, by identifying the right
resources and keeping leadership aligned on timelines. As this was automating
and interacting with API endpoints of third party software it needed a security
review, which we had missed in our initial planning. So whatever team had worked
on I mentioned it was a POC to back the security discussion and single handedly
handled the security review - collecting all the relevant data and documenting
whatever the team was working on and the review went through - I made sure this
did not block the development or took developer's bandwidth. Now we had the data
integrated from a third party software to our internal database and I built a
dashboard on top of it for leadership for quick glance on knowing what projects
are in progress, approved or blocked and if blocked then why and who is working
on getting it resolved. This became a central dashboard where Org-wide leaders
started using this dashboard - also it was real time as data refreshed whenever
there was a change on the Jira.

Anonymous · Answer

At Centercard, I was leading a team of DevOps team - being a startup we had to
make some choice due to budgetry constraints. I had to choose between Hosted ELK
or hosting our own ELK on EKS. Initially it sould be a good idea to go with EKS
option as It would enable us to save around 30% as opposed to Hosted ELK based
on our calculation at the time. Team went ahead and deployed and for a while it
worked, before going to prod. while doing load testing there was an update to
our K8 cluster causing ELK to go down, it took DevOps team sometime to figure
out the root cause. This caused dealy in the project, I had to revert course and
go with Hosted ELK as at that time, I realized my team was not prepared any
downtime in production. In the end the migration was smooth and we did not have
any customer impact, apart from the slight delay in the release. Lesson I leant
is that I should be able to access strenght and areas of improvement for my team
and play to their strength.

Anonymous · Answer

In one of my program, QA had identified more integration issues at the last
minute. This became a risk for delivering the project as planned. To handle
them, i had proposed the stakeholders by asking the devs to test the bug fixes
with the help of testcases return by QA and get them reviewed from lead QA. BY
doing this, we were able to deliver the project on time as planned

Anonymous · Answer

In my latest opportunity, we had a setup in rollout Lot Control. The setback
came as noncooperation from the business due to failure to involve the business
at the start of the project.We overcome that by presenting to the business the
objective and value addition to the business in executing the project with their
OKRs. we also highlighted what is the help required from the business and their
responsibilities in moving the project further.

Describe a major problem or setback in a project of yours and how did you overcome it?

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