Who Am I?

I am filling up the Interview questionnaire of SP Jain. It has some wonderful qualitative questions which taken me to introspection mode. Here are Q&A. My Interview is on February 26th in Mumbai. Will update you all folks on that. Thanks a lot for your valuable comments.

 

1. Explain a situation when you were a part of a team where the group process and/or intended outcome failed. What was your role, how did you contribute to the process or outcome, and what did you learn?

During third year in college, we were organizing the technical conference of Electronics Communication Engineering department. I was leading the organizing team as Chairman. We put forth three months of hard work in planning, sponsorship collection and organizing the function. We were progressing with system in place and with the guidance of our professors. On the eve of function, a political chaos brewed up in the state due to arrest of a political leader and there was mass violence following it. That chaos almost brought our conference to a halt. We had to run through the whole show without expected outcome and with minimum people. That situation was unexpected and unplanned, which shattered the morale of entire organizing team. On hindsight, after analyzing the failure, we found out the importance of adversity planning. Adversity planning should be part of system where we analyze the fallback option in each and every stage, incase of untoward events. That was added to the system exist in our college for organizing functions.

 

2. Explain a situation where you have brought about any improvement either in your self, work or society.

Volunteered as placement coordinator and worked with team of 24 members in my college’s placement cell during my final year in college. We worked with guidance of a professor as Placement Officer and a student leader as Placement Secretary. Started with brochure preparation and organizing workshops for students during the vacation preceding the placement season. We went to different cities inIndia to invite companies to visit our campus during placement season. I worked with 3 other members to invite IT and Engineering companies in and around Bangalore. That experience lay stepping stone in professionalizing my marketing skills. It helped us in evaluating corporate needs which we could leverage to mould our students during the companies visit in campus later. Worked with my team members to help our students to land in their dream job and to overcome their weakness in job search. We conducted mock interviews to help candidate to understand his weakness and leverage his strengths. The entire process culminated with record-high of 90% placements in different engineering stream in our college during 2001.

 

3. Describe an instance in which you took the strongest stand of your value system. What specific values were violated and what was at stake for you?

My value “never insult or denounce others and don’t ever bias a group for self interest” was tested strongly while I worked as Chairman- Students’ union and Chairman- Harmony organizing committee (Harmoc), in college for 2000-01. Organizing Harmony, the inter-college cultural function, was the biggest challenge before us. The monetary requirement for the function met by collecting sponsorships, for which all college students volunteer. As way of encouragement, Harmoc gave away the rights over entertainment stalls during function to group of students, who collected majority of sponsorships. Though started as a way of encouragement, the bidding process came with ill of causing enmity between students and group formation. During my period, we consciously discouraged student group’s dominance over the bidding and function. But in the day before function, the issue came up in a big way from my juniors. They unofficially formed groups and went for sponsorships, came to Harmoc over bidding rights. We were in dilemma of whether to encourage bidding process, bias a group or to lose all these students while organizing. After marathon discussion on night before Harmony eve, we arrived at common opinion: scrapped bidding and encouraged both groups to work in unison for function’s mission. The issue came out of blue and my value system guided me in arriving at the collective decision.

 

4. Give a detailed description of the roles, responsibilities and achievements at your current /last place of employment.(in not more than 300 words)

During tenure in my previous company, I worked in multiple roles viz., team member, senior engineer and team leader, as I progress in my career. As team leader and senior engineer, my responsibility is to analyze the project requirements, project planning, estimation of man-hours and resource requirements and the efficient performance metrics that can be achieved in given constraints. Project planning includes division of the project into tasks and assigning the team and resources for each task with challenging goals. In engineering perspective, my responsibilities are to implement the multimedia codec (speech, audio, imaging and video) in a given embedded system, that includes porting and optimization with different tools. Completed the project CDMA speech codec on given Digital Signal Processor in the capacity of Team Leader and with an efficient engineering team of 6 members in planned and systematic way. In business perspective, that delivery paved the way for continuous business with same client and established my organization’s efficiency and quality deep in customer’s mind. That success is what I value as my best achievement during my earlier tenure. This achievement had a lot of hurdles during the eleventh hour to cross. Those tough situations taught us the power of team more than individual contributors and that built the team morale. This achievement had transformed me from independent paradigm to interdependent paradigm.

 

 

Adversity faced in life.	Not faced adversities in my formative years, with due respect to my parents planning and sacrifices.
Distinct contributions to the society by you or your family members.	We are running a school in my native village, Akkur, for rural children. Family members are active members of Rotary club and contribute to society in different dimensions (medical, health, education & infrastructure)
My formative years…	Grown up with independent and entrepreneurship spirit. Got quality education and competitive environment to grow. Went for several opportunities in engineering college viz., student’s union and placement cell to nurture management and organizing talents. Learnt the importance of systems in big institution during ISRO tenure. Progressing in my career in high technology embedded systems domain as planned.

Feel free to post your comments.

Read more!