From Reduced In Force To Employed: Lessons From A Covid-19 Story
- By Christophe Schuhmann, Aug 19th, 2020
I was laid off in April due to Covid-19, like too many, and actively immediately started to look for new opportunities. Over the next 2 months, I was either ignored or rejected, sometimes even after presenting one-week-worth-of-work case studies for positions, I thought I was a perfect fit. I never felt discouraged, as finding a job is actually “working”, and having been there before, I knew the drill that this was and always is a long-game play.
But then, something extraordinary occurred
I got identified by Intelliswift talent recruiters through searches on LinkedIn, where my profile came up.
After being let go, the first thing I did was to hire professionals to build my resume and profile for $230 (the best investment I ever made). They know how to articulate/present your skills/ experience by using keywords that would attract visibility and match job description compatibility. Most recruiters, today, use robotic tools to find the best matching candidates.
To all job seekers out there, get professional help!
I talked with the recruiter and asked for the job description. It was short and cryptic. My first takeaway was that I was not a good fit. But the recruiter kept insisting and I accepted to be presented. I had very low expectations and nothing to lose.
To all job seekers out there, never reject an opportunity!
The first interview was set up a few days later, on a Tuesday, with the direct manager hiring for the position. I was relaxed and just talked about my background and experience in the travel industry, with humility and without making any assumptions. But I asked a lot of questions to better understand the role. The conversation was fluid and pleasant.
To all job seekers out there, ask questions and no question is irrelevant or silly!
Immediately after, the recruiter reached out and asked me if I was available the next day to be interviewed by the first interviewer’s boss. I was surprised (as it never happened before) but complied, of course, with the request. Part 2 went well, and once again I asked more questions. I was immediately notified that I qualified for a third interview the next day. I passed it and was asked to be interviewed again on Friday, this time with the big boss. I wanted to keep the momentum and stay relaxed despite the rising stakes.
Within one hour, after the final interview, I was notified that I got the job.
To all job seekers out there, just keep the faith, miracles happen.
10 days later on July 20, 2020, came the first day in my new role, as a “Technical Project Manager” contractor for a major Silicon Valley company exactly 2 months and 20 days after my previous job termination date.
Welcome to part 2 of the story.
My direct manager, the first interviewer, asked me to watch two recorded video demos about an old, hard to maintain, obsolete application managing invoicing and financial reconciliation for corporate travel bookings. The project was to assess how to migrate the current tool to an internal database.
I did not receive training or any kind of onboarding and felt I was thrown in the fire pit bare-naked. Instead of being defeated, I accepted the challenge and started the analytical assessment. I compiled notes and once again asked a lot of questions. Going back and forth with my manager, who was very responsive, I quickly grasped the basic functionalities of this complex tool. My previous expertise in the travel industry helped a lot and understood better the reasons why I was identified and selected in the first place.
From there, I conducted a very detailed analysis, inspecting a multitude of input files (imports), and output files (exports), generating hundreds of automated reports to internal and third parties.
I documented this first week of work with granularity and thoroughness using collaborative tools.
I felt more and more comfortable with the assessment task at hand but needed to use creative thinking to avoid being lost in the details, blind-siding myself.
I decided to approach the problem from the end and to walk my way backward.
This is when I started to use my whiteboard to draw boxes, identifying actors, processes, keys, data, and relationships. What I came up with was messy but decided boldly to take a picture and sent it to my manager for validation. I wanted to make sure I was on the right track. Being validated, I carried away my whiteboard messy drawings to a graphic tool. The more I was doing this, the more the picture became clear. At the end of week 2. I had a high-level view and functional design documents. They were clear, concise, organized, and colorful. I was ready for a presentation to my direct manager’s manager (the second interviewer). It went a lot better than I could ever imagine as his feedback was:
“Spectacular work!”
Please find below my recommended takeaways:
- Ask questions
- A lot
- No question is silly
- Do your homework
- Take your time
- Investigate and compile
- Reflect and use creative thinking
- Define and understand the end goals
- Identify and summarize the necessary steps going backward to achieve the end goals
- Identify possible bottlenecks and showstoppers (if any)
- Propose a logical and documented approach and solutions
- Write a clear and concise presentation
- Use diagrams as much as you can
- Get to the essential points quickly
Below is the “Problem Statement” that I was offered to resolve.
Questions:
- What are the problems we aim to solve?
- From a business perspective, what is the perfect solution?
Summary
Currently, company X relies on application Y to achieve financial reconciliation and invoicing for all corporate travel bookings. The code is old and not sustainable to maintain, because the current application was developed in the 1990s and has a 90s Windows application user interface, and is connected to a Paradox database which hasn't been supported since 2008.
The processes to import and export data are complex, cumbersome, and prone to yield errors, corrected through manual inputs.
This project is to migrate Y to an internal X database while simplifying processes without compromising invoice management, financial reconciliation and outputs quality.
The perfect solution from a business perspective is to regain ownership while simplifying and streamlining processes and building new cutting- edge functionalities, like data visualization using Tableau.
Technical aspects
Reconciliation is done linking the booking travel information called PNR (Passenger Name Record) created by the GDS Sabre to the traveler profile. Therefore, the first step is to IMPORT those PNRs into the company's own database. To do so, we need to use API calls to get the data from Sabre in an XML format, identify the elements that we need, parse them and store them into company's Oracle Database. Second, we have to associate the PNR with the company's profile, especially with the DSID, Cost Center, and Division numbers.
We also need to build our own Admin Console to create and manage all the static data.
Methodology
- Research and Analysis
- First assessments
- High-Level functional design and flows
- Validation and feedback
- Users
- Stakeholders
- Engineering
- Partners
- Iteration
- Based on feedback
- Rewriting
- Granularity
- Evil is in the details
- Solving showstoppers
- Detailed plan
- Validation and feedback round 2
- Greenlight
- Proposal
- Presentation
- Sign-off
- Stakeholders
- Implementation
