Lead an initiative essay

It is common in an IT company to get an email from your boss with a spreadsheet, requesting
data. Be it the status of your training or your area’s work projection for the next year. The person
sending such a request needs to merge spreadsheets from several employees. The number of
employees can be significant depending on the level the request is initiated. For requests initiated
at, say, the VP level, the reporting and merging of data happens at several levels to put data in
one spreadsheet, often a mundane task that is not only inefficient but also laden with copy-paste
mistakes.

From a young age I developed a mindset of optimizing businesses to increase its efficiency, such
as employing better technology, reducing redundancy, making efficient use of resources and
automating. So when my supervisor, XXXX, and his supervisor, XXXX, expressed their desire
over a casual conversation to have an application that could automatically merge spreadsheets
accurately, the idea set-off my imagination right away.

I spent that evening with paper and pen, contemplating the design of such an application. Though
management’s requirement was only to have a ‘machine’ instead of a ‘person’ merge
spreadsheets, I could visualize that such an application could have many advantages. Although
leading two teams at work consumed all my billable hours, I got so excited about the idea that
the next morning I told XXXX that I would volunteer for it.

I estimated the effort to develop this software at 2’000 hours, which could take me months. So, I
got approval to use 5 non-billable new hires. Not only did I need to train them before they could
be productive, but they were also disappointed to be assigned to a non-billable project. I
proposed putting team members’ names on the application. The better the application, the more
likely someone would notice and want to have them on his billable project. This inspired the
team. Over the next 4 months, I worked with my new team from the ground up. We created
prototypes based on the ideas I had jotted down and showed it to several managers. We added
several innovative features and improved their user friendliness through iterative feedback.

The management found the ‘Configurable Portal’ to be even more useful than they expected
from prototypes, and it surpassed their initial requirement. In fact, the application entirely
replaced the spreadsheet as a more efficient system of collecting data from a large number of
employees, reducing time by as much as 80% and eliminating errors. All 5 team members soon
found a billable project. I was greatly satisfied that I could make this process more efficient for
my company. Now instead of a spreadsheet, most employees at Infosys Chandigarh receive a
link to a webpage from their manager, inviting them to enter data. The rest is taken care of!