Business School

Essay Question 2: In reviewing the last five years, describe a situation in which you felt particularly effective as a member of team. (Limit 500 words)

Picture an environment in which a 14 to 16 work day was the norm rather than the exception and where working through the night was as common as weekly status meetings. These were the realities of a Deloitte Consulting engagement I had worked on at Deutsche Bank. My first roll was to be part of the testing team. Since the system was to "go live" in 3 months the pressure was on to ensure that all the bugs in the system would be found and fixed. This put considerable stress on the team. The team didn't have enough time to give me an overview of the project. They basically gave me the project blueprints to review. This wouldn't be the course of action in a normal situation due to the complexity of the system. I didn't let this discourage me, and took a proactive approach to learning the system. I put in extra effort to learn the system, even on my own personal time. Within 2 weeks I was up to speed and able to assist my team in testing.

The testing team would work long hours due to the tight deadlines, and it was common for management to ask us to stay longer with little notice. I did not, however, let this affect my attitude towards the team. I understood that since this kind of system had never been built before, project time estimations would be inevitably off. I also helped the team when new team members joined. I knew how hard it was for me to learn the system by myself, and I was good at communicating technical material in a manner that non technical people understood, so I took the initiate to get them up to speed. This was necessary since other team members were busy and did not have the time to sit down with new team members.

As the project progressed I was put on the operations team. The operations team was responsible for monitoring the system when trades would be sent. The team had to be able to understand how the whole system works. To accomplish this I had to put in a great effort to learn the whole system. Moreover, the system needed 24 hour support. The operations team was required to work in shifts to accomplish this task. The shifts occurred in 12 hour time frames but usually lasted up to 16 hours. The start times of the shifts would change due to changing business needs, and every week you would be working a different shift, so that