MBA behavioral essay: "Went beyond what was defined"

I would appreciate your feedback on my essay. Does my essay answer the question asked, and does it bring across my personal characteristics in an easy to understand manner? The business school is not looking for lessons learned in this essay, just the facts and my actions.

Essay: Please describe a time when you went beyond what was defined, expected, established, or popular. (500 words or less, limited to one page)

Our users lacked the required training and knowledge to use our engineering software product properly. Our user manuals, the only available documentation for our product, were the main cause of this problem. These manuals were frequently created quite late, took a lot of time to be updated and did not allow getting feedback from our users to improve our manuals. Most users did not read these manuals and hence did not know how to use our product properly, resulting in numerous support calls and a general feeling that our product was too complex.

My department had been creating manuals this way since many years. In 200X, I started a project to improve our user manuals, knowing that changing this way of working would require going beyond the defined and established way.

I first concentrated on generating support for the project. I talked to people who were interested in improving our user manuals and got them involved as team members. I also initiated discussions on current problems with our user manuals, helping people become aware of these problems.

After analysing the current situation and problems, I and my team started introducing changes. Business analysts, who specified the software product, would now create the manuals during the product testing phase. This would make the manuals available as soon as the product was released. The manuals would also be moved onto a Wiki, a dynamic website where any user can create or change any content. This would make our manuals more modular, easy to search through and facilitate getting feedback from users by allowing them to make changes to the content, although without any review and approval process.

There was resistance to the new ways of working and especially the absence of a review process on the Wiki. After talking to them and understanding their requirements, I introduced an innovative reactive-review process which no one had tried before. An administrator would review the changes made to the content after they were made, and roll them back if needed. I then managed the pilot implementation of the new process, with encouraging results. These results convinced everyone to implement the changes.

Our user manuals have improved substantially after the changes were implemented. The Wiki is now the standard help system for our users, with users actively improving the content. Manuals on new features are delivered well in time. Our product was also acknowledged recently as one which requires the least user support.

I read your essay and I thought it was quite boring, because when I read the essay prompt, I was expecting an example in which you went 'beyond what was defined'. You have not really done that in your written example. What you did was pretty much provide a solution.


I do not think youve answered the question. Definitely not an interesting and engaging way.
I would not say that it brings across your personal characteristics at all. Your essay is just so insipid due to the lack of personal narrative, description, details and personal discussion. What you do instead, is make a point and then make a new one. The overall tone however, is 'I did this. Then this. That happened. This happened'. There is no flavor or life to your essay in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback. I have changed the structure and some of the content. I prefer not changing the topic as for me this is an example of "going beyond" the defined way. Does this essay now answer the quesion asked?

Essay 1: Please describe a time when you went beyond what was defined, expected, established, or popular. (500 words or less, limited to one page)

Our user manuals are the only available end-user documentation for our engineering software product. The usual practice in my team was to create these user manuals after the product was released. In addition, the user manuals were created in the form of very large documents. Due to their size, these manuals were created quite late and most users did not read through the whole document. Hence they were not able to use the software properly after it was released.

I understood that this way of creating manuals resulted in numerous support calls and a general feeling that our product was too complex. Even though creating the manuals was not my responsibility, I felt compelled to improve these manuals so that our users have a better opinion of our product. In 2007, I volunteered to create them for our next product release.

After analysing the current situation, I made changes to the usual way of creating these manuals. I created these manuals during the product testing phase before the product was released. This ensured that the manuals were ready at the time the software was released. Also, instead of creating the manuals as large documents, I proposed to put them onto a Wiki, a dynamic website where any user can create or change any content. This would made the manuals more modular and facilitate updating specific articles without revising the whole document. This would also allow our users to make changes and give feedback on the content, although without a content review process.

Some people in my team objected to creating manuals on the Wiki and especially to the absence of a review process. After talking to them and understanding their requirements, I introduced an innovative reactive-review process. An administrator would review the changes made to the content after they were made, and roll them back if needed. With this review process, the Wiki was accepted and the manuals were moved onto this Wiki.

The manuals for our next release were delivered together with the product. Our team appreciated the facility of easily updating individual articles on the Wiki. Our users also appreciated the Wiki and it's modular structure which facilitated reading these manuals. Seeing these results, my team decided to incorporate creating user manuals during the product testing phase in the standard process. Now, manuals on new features are delivered well in time and the Wiki is the standard help system for our users. Our product was also acknowledged recently as one which requires the least user support.

I notice you've got a lot of "to be" verbs in your first paragraph. This goes towards what Liebe was saying, that your essay is written in such a stale manner. I feel like I'm reading a report you had to file on your project, not *yourself,* which is fundamentally what the readers are looking for.

The narration is so broad, and as Liebe said, feels like a timeline. However, I see you've made a bit more of an effort to show how unpopular your idea was, which is important. If you were to focus the narrative on a smaller moment in time when you were arguing for your idea against a majority, won it with some deft compromise, and then continued on to make your project a success, your essay would be more engaging and would better accentuate your ability to think outside the box, come up with a good compromise, and persist in the face of opposition.