Tough situation examples

During one of my interviews, questions appeared about my experience resolving tough situations in a team.

I have much experience working with teams, but I used to work in a toxic environment. So, any toughness was normal. Anyway, I remember some good examples.

Continuous struggling

As part of a backoffice in Worldline, one of our responsibilities is reconciliation, so we parsed reports from the partner.

My team moved a region to accept payments from legacy to a new system. Meanwhile, our partner updated their platform. During development, testing and piloting in production, everything was fine.

When we went live, we started to receive every day absolutely different data in the files from our partner. The team had to pre-reconcile them manually.

During the first weeks, I identified stakeholders using the RACI model and escalated the issue to the C-level, creating meetings to inform and consult with our bosses. Finally, I got confirmation that our partner send us reports in their new standard, and they are not willing to fix it.

At the same time, the teammates who were working on the manual pre-reconciliation were more and more demotivated every day. I kept transparency so everybody knew that it was not our fault, and a lot of people tried to solve the issue with their partners.

From the first day of the issue, I was looking a way to implement processing for the new files in our system. I proposed to the team to get rid of the hope that we'll receive the expected data from our partner.

We decided to make weekly shifts for the manual pre-reconciliation, and the other teammates developed a solution to reconcile files automatically. Also, I offered to start the resolution development creating little programs-helpers to reduce manual efforts first. It additionally gave us the ability to test implementation ideas very quickly.

In two weeks, we reduced manual efforts from 12 to 5 man-days a week. Then, we were building a new solution, and in 2 months, the manual process required only 15 minutes a day.

The whole team was working together and had only one goal—to eliminate manual work from teammates as soon as possible.

Finally, I created a set of retrospectives with all participants in the project to identify actions that will help us mitigate the same issues in the future projects.

Underperformance new-joiner

When I was working in Sberbank, I hired a very talented Java developer. He met all our expectations. But after the probation period, the whole team noticed that he came to the office being exosted and without any desire to work. The whole team couldn't understand the problem, and the new-joiner didn't want to share. He just kept silent, while all his objectives were failed.

I wanted to keep him on the team because he was an excellent developer, and we had a hiring freeze at that time. I proposed to my manager that we give him a chance.

I discussed with the developer and finalized that he is too bored with his daily routine. He just arrived in a big city without any idea what to do at non-working hours; meanwhile, as usual for new joiners, his tasks were too easy and tedious.

• Together with the team, we assert to him some challenging tasks;
• I got a budget for courses to keep him busy and expand his competence;
• We had weekly check-ins to measure his engagement by the level of confidence.

As far as I know, he is now one of the strongest engineers on the team. I know that it worked because the developer wanted to stay and just didn't know how to improve his daily routine. But for me, it was a very interesting challenge to give a chance and to build an agreement between a person and a team.

Security impediments

At Sberbank, it was difficult to communicate with the security and architecture departments. Through a delivery process, we demonstrate every feature to security and architecture departments.

The security officer attached to our team was a completely non-technical person. The team couldn't understand his requirements, and our explanations were too hard to comprehend. I tried to find a connection point with him, including a set of 1-2-1 knowledge transfer sessions that I made special for him. Meanwhile, I tried to help the team understand his point of view.

The whole team was so mad about this guy's behaviour. I taugh the team not to judge his personally, but reflect on his behaviour to understand better his point of view.

With the team and the officer, we were keeping a cadence in our activities to eliminate misunderstandings.

Finally, we got a very helpful security officer.