The Onsite stint (eBay, San Jose)-

From being an onsite lead for couple of projects, bug-triager [self coined word], helping any project from any domain during critical times in rescoping, capacity analysis, requirement understanding, and even production bug fixing.

Not only this, sometimes, I was even approached by the eBay domain teams for help in their projects. I have even ended up working late hours and on weekends for projects not even related to me.

 Now I came across couple of situations, that I should analyse upon-

1)      Time management is awfully tough. One side you have a 911 situation, impacting business, and on the other side your own project team from offshore is waiting for their questionnaire to be answered.

2)      Your ass is screwed if your offshore team does not show up the same level of commitment and diligence in the work as you do.

3)      You are a problem solver, but you are forgotten as soon as the project goes live, just because you were never part of the project.

4)      At times you need to take decisions to either work on your project which is going smooth, but has little pending tasks, or to help out the other teams who need your expertise in some area. This mostly happens during the late hours of the evening, by when I have made up some other plans.

 Now a couple of learnings and improvement areas-

1)      Try to say a big NO if you think that you cannot help, this applies to anyone you are conversing with, less, people start taking you for granted.

2)      Do not consider your clients to be GOD, show them the finger if they start sitting on your head. TIT for TAT

3)      Raise an alarm if you feel the pressure. This raises the pressure on your supervisor. You aren’t saying NO to anyone, but just balancing the pressureJ.

4)      Make others feel your importance sometimes.

5)      If you think your deliverable is impacted because of a lazy team-mate offshore, escalate to any extent to get the work done, or get him off the board.

6)      Do not receive the calls, if you can’t.

7)      Always ensure that your manager is well aware of your working hours, and the work.

8)      Do not take in any negative comment or feedback, unless you think you should.

 The stint is still continuing, so will keep posting more.