Can you share an experience where you had to challenge your teammate's approach?

In my role as a Team Manager at a call center, we were implementing a new process to handle high call volumes during peak seasons. One of the senior managers proposed a strategy that involved extending work hours for all agents, including mandatory overtime, to ensure we met our service level agreements (SLAs).

While the proposed strategy aimed to address call volumes, I believed it would lead to burnout among the agents and negatively impact their morale and productivity. My task was to present an alternative solution that could achieve the same goals without overburdening the team.

I conducted a thorough analysis of our call volume patterns and agent performance metrics. I identified that not all hours during the extended period were equally busy and that a more targeted approach could be effective.

I developed an alternative proposal that involved optimizing our shift schedules. This included:

I scheduled a meeting with the senior manager and other stakeholders. I presented my findings and the alternative proposal, highlighting the potential benefits:

During the meeting, I respectfully disagreed with the initial proposal and explained the long-term negative impacts of mandatory overtime. I backed up my stance with data and examples from previous high-call-volume periods where burnout had led to increased absenteeism and turnover.

After a detailed discussion, the senior manager agreed to pilot the staggered shifts and part-time workforce approach. The implementation led to several positive outcomes:

This experience taught me the importance of having a backbone and respectfully disagreeing when necessary. It reinforced the value of using data to support my arguments and the need for collaborative problem-solving. By challenging the initial approach, I was able to implement a solution that benefited both the team and the organization.

In one of the project, QA manager asked to utilize automation to speed up the testing cycle. However I had concerns about using automation. 

My task was to ensure that high standards for the delivery of the product and address my concerns.

For this, I consolidated all evidence and convened one to one meeting with the manager. 

Discussion started by sharing my concerns that- status of the project is still under development which leads to continuous changes in the scope. secondly, the project is all file based which leads to more time executing regression. Also, to test one functionality, it requires lot of explicit wait time to complete the test. I also prepared a small demo to explain my concerns.

After discussion, manager agreed on not utilizing this automation at the moment. There was a task created in backlog to automate in future. 

Thus, this incident helped to save critical time, addressing concerns helped to achieve better approach towards testing.

At Auctane, the setup was such that Eng. Teams would delvelop code, and the deployment and operations was done by DevOps team. Even for Dev,Test environments. A key cloud ops eng, left the company during a critical phase of a project I was responsible for. This impacted our teams velocity, when I requested to prioritize our teams items, director of DevOps said that there was no other way around and we just have to be in the queue. I disagreed but started to look for alternatives in the background. I talked to other managers and found a common thread. I realized this a bottleneck for a the dev teams, hence I proposed the idea of having a process, where in our dev would generate the initial terraform scripts - collobrate with CloudOps eng to get an approval after which the devs has the autonomy to deploy in dev and test environments. While the Prod deploy will still be under Dev Ops. After convicing my peers, I held a meeting with DevOps director as well. I presented the pros and cons and Director brought into this process. By implementing this approach - it was a win-win scenario. The DevOps team got the time it wanted to hire the right eng. and we reduced the bottleneck for the lack of resource. We could improve our deploy cycle by 20%

it happens on one of our project where I disagree withe team members approach on the navigation system in the mobile app. team member will to show all menus under the humberger menu but I wanted to give main navigation at the footer because its easy to navigate the from there with the single hand asn the button are near to fingertips.