750 (Q49, V42)

My friend wanted to have a go at the following snippet:

Please give us an important business achievement where you showed exemplary leadership (maximum 1000 characters


At Work:
I have demonstrated ability to take up responsibility and showed leadership skills under highly stressful and demanding conditions right

at the beginning of my career. As part of Production support Mercator specialist in the Middleware Team, I was responsible for

handling all the Production related issues pertaining to my area of expertise which is a Middleware tool called Mercator 6.7

(owned by IBM). The other technology used for this support is IBM MQSeries which is looked after by different experts.


As a fresh graduate out of the most coveted engineering college in India, the Indian Institute of Technology, I think it was a reflection

of the belief that my employers had put me that I became in charge of the entire Production Hub withing 6 months of joining IBM

India Pvt Ltd.

The day of my calling came on 28th March 2006, when all of sudden we came to know that there has been a labor unrest in the city

of Kolkata(India), where the support is based from. Because of this unrest almost 95% of IBM employees could not come to office and I

was the only person sitting in charge of the entire Production Hub right in the Middle of French go-live preparation

and a host of urgent tasks to be completed on that day itself. Instead of getting nervous and acting in a hurry, I first organized my

thoughts and started planning.To begin with, I arranged the most important work and issues on the basis of their urgency, reflecting their

impact on the Production systems and hence client business, the second thing I did was to inform immediately my Team Lead and Delivery

Manager about the current situation and discussed ways to tackle this situation. After about half an hour of conference call, I sent out a

mail to the onsite experts (very lean team of 3 members only and used for extremely critical issues) including their Team Lead Stefan

Ziranek, our client, informing that they might experience a little hiccup in the service that we provide because of the current situation.

Thereafter, I sat down resolving over 50 production issues one by one. It involved not just extensive working knowledge of a particular

software but also communication abilities to talk to the Market contacts based all over Europe and America. As a result of my dedication

and leadership, I not only covered the production support for 13 hours straight, but also attended the daily conference call with our client,

Nestle, which involved giving updates, suggesting ways to address impeding problems and most important not letting the client worry

about the internal problem that we were facing.


I managed the entire day so well on two accounts: Solving production issues in time and communicating with the client successfully. For

this single day , I received ORION star Award from IBM India Pvt Ltd as a recognition of my contribution to the organization.

This day mattered a lot to us because of another reason,

the contract for Production support was still not awarded to IBM. Till this time we were competing with WIPRO Technologies

(another big Indian IT Services company) to get this work. Months later, it was the days like this that eventually played the most important

role when IBM won the contract to provide this support by Nestle in spite of stiff competition from Wipro. As time went by, I

learned a great deal about working in the other technical area (MQSeries) of this support and slowly became the most sought

after resource in my team.