Ankit’s knack of taking up challenging opportunities and fearless attitude push him to tackle new problems that at times he is not be able to complete with his existing skill set. I consider his inability to gauge his limitations as a shortcoming.
In one instance, Ankit gave a go ahead to the production team that certain raw material would get procured and delivered to the plant by a certain date after just establishing a rate contract.
However, due to some manufacturing complications at its end, the vendor did not supply the material on time and production could not start. Although Ankit was able to get an alternate supplier by holding multiple negotiation discussions, and the overall production timelines were not impacted, I gave a feedback to Ankit to be more thoughtful while making time commitments. I told him to weigh all the potential challenges that can come in and ask for buffer time if needed before giving a go ahead.
Ankit took the feedback on a positive note and consulted his superiors on their approach and made sure that moving forward he comes up with comprehensive analysis of risks that may arise at different phases of procurement, and create mitigation and contingency plans to avoid them. He also suggested that we document such scenarios from the past and draw patterns to standardize our approach while collaborating with vendors. This was very impressive to me, given the fact that such instances, although not frequent, were not new to us. This later served as use case for the new joiners to derive their learning.
In subsequent assignments, Ankit also made a practice to schedule regular meet ups with the shortlisted vendor to detect early signals of ‘things going wrong’ and take corrective measures well in advance without affecting the timelines