Interview Help

From Interview Email

Context – Action – Result

Exceptional Analytical and leadership abilities. Ability to persevere through challenges

Think of times you have had to draw important insights from data sources to inform decisions and strategies

When have you taken on leadership roles – think of 5E’s – do not think about leadership as a form of delegation and motivating.

Envision – defining a clear vision for what you are trying to accomplish

Enroll – sharing the vision with key people and organizations that will be helpful to moving it from concept to reality

Energize – excite the people and org enrolled in delivering the vision so they make it a priority

Enable – remove barriers and ensure conditions for success

Execute – create efficient action plans that are strategic and robust and resourced to move from vision to reality.

A time when goals suddenly changed and you could not complete before the timeline

Performance review includes a business wide training of procurements processes. I was tailoring the training around a new EAM system that basically encompassed every area of the business and would tie in to our current Requisitioning system. A few months into developing the training, I was told EAM would no longer replace our requisition system and thus much of my training documents would now be irrelevant.

Due to this I went to my boss and discussed some of the issues I would be facing due to this changing. My boss asked if I would like to change my performance metric due to this unforeseen event, but I felt that this initiative was much too important to completely abandon.

While my documentation was very specific to our requisitioning system changing, there were some key take always that were still very relevant and a whole lot of training that I could complete based on a much higher and process driven level. That’s what we decided to do, so I got together with my team and we continued to discuss some of the areas that we should focus on. We completed the training and our Req to PO time went from 8 days to 5, meaning the integrity of each req has consistently improved to a point that we can process reqs much faster.

A time you made a process more time or cost efficient

One of the reasons hired me was because I came from a very process driven and multi national company that puts a lot of time, money and research into their processes. They knew that I could take some of my experience with this company and improve the processes at the to make them both more time and cost efficient. On top of this, the was about to go through an extensive audit that would evaluate all of our major process documents to ensure we are doing what is necessary to meet nuclear and publically funded requirements.

The steps involved were as follows:

• Evaluating our current processes before the audit and identifying areas of improvement.

• Bringing in auditors to review our documents, interview the author of the documents, and determine gaps

• Reviewing the gap/non conformances and creating an action plan

The first step was where I focussed on how we could save time and money. One of the biggest things I identified is the amount of repetitive work that we currently do. A completing a req but missing so much information that they buyer would need to retake every step.

A challenge you overcame

While I had some supervision experience in the past, was my first management job. I was coming in with less education (SCMP) than some of the people that would be working for me.

The quickest thing I learnt is to manage personalities. My two buyers are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One enjoys doing the exact same thing every day and doing it well and efficiently. The other is extremely detail oriented to a point