Chevening Application: Interactive Leadership, providing solutions to a problem

Leadership essay for the Chevening

Hello all. Please review my essay on Leadership for the Chevening application. Thank you.

As a Learning Team Leader, co-managing eight of our clients, my day to day involves finding solutions to issues raised by clients on our Monitoring and Evaluation (M&E) software. I can address most of the issues immediately, because of my knowledge of the system, but at times have to consult or hold discussions with the software team, to find a solution.This part of my job means taking lead to ensure that the problem is clearly and effectively communicated to the team, and once a solution is found, to follow up on making sure it has been implemented, and to provide feedback to the client in good time.

I am also responsible for testing new/updated functionality before and after system rollout. I have been heavily involved in testing a new functionality that integrates our M&E software with an open source offline data collection platform. This integration allows for survey forms created on our M&E software to be pushed to the offline data collection platform from where surveys can be given.

In October 2017, while configuring our M&E software for a client, we came across a use case that required project indicators to be processed using variables of ranking type; our system cannot handle variables of this datatype at the moment, for it would need a way to recognise them. The offline data collection platform can and we have therefore had to create ranking variables as multiple choice questions then manually convert them on getting to the offline data collection platform. During a discussion with one of the developers, I provided a solution that ranking type questions should be created in their own section so as to be easily identified when the survey form is pushed to the offline data collection platform.I am currently drafting an end to end description of this solution for the software team to work on its implementation.

In August 2017, while testing the data collection platform, I noticed that there was no consistent flow of processes from our M&E software to the data collection application. The gaps/issues identified were:

1.Managing user accounts; the question here was whether every enumerator or data entry clerk needed a user account on each application
2.The data collection application couldn't support creation of survey forms to be shared publicly without requiring authentication
3.Since a link is required to take/give the survey, any changes made to the server interfered with all links created before and either opened the wrong survey form or did not open at all

I therefore called a meeting of all the software developers involved in the integration so that we could come up with a workflow of managing user accounts and survey forms and in talking through the process, identify any other gaps. The above issues have since been fixed.

These are but a few instances when I have taken charge to seek for or provide solutions to a problem. I look forward to an opportunity to strengthen these leadership skills.

@bmKimmy

This essay should be more about how you develop a networking, and how you benefited from it. You wrote more about problem solving there. Maybe you can add more on how you work on networking at your current job.

@bmKimmy
I found your essay quite technical. When writing an essay of this nature, you have to assume the reviewer isn't grounded in your field. Thus your essay needs to be as easy to connect with as possible. So I would suggest you revise it in such a way that would be less technical and easy to follow by anyone.

Thanks.

Hi Kimmy. Your essay is pretty good, however, I feel you should add a bit of detail about how you fixed the issues instead of just saying that the issues were fixed. Right now, it implies that a meeting was called and all issues were discussed and they automatically got resolved. As someone working in the corporate world, I know that sometimes even a hundred meetings are not enough for resolving issues so you need to revisit that bit and explain the approach towards the resolution of this issue, and also talk about the steps taken. Thanks.

Bilhah, the reviewer is not interested in an outline of the problems that you encountered and had to resolve. In fact, there is nothing in your essay that appears to showcase any leadership or influencing skills on your part. You were more of an analytical person in this situation than a physical leader or an inspirational figure. Nothing you presented in this essay works to prove that you have any of the required skills because of the lack of reference to the physical interaction between you and the team. I sincerely do not believe that this essay will be of use to you in this instance. You have to figure out a team situational scenario where you had to take charge of resolving an issue that affected the final outcome of the project. From there, consider how you were able to get the team to focus on working together instead of infighting in order to resolve the issue, based upon your leadership, sooner, rather than later. That will be the example of the influencing part of your essay. A quick revision of the essay should help you resolve the problem you have at the moment. The only thing that might take a bit longer, is your figuring out an appropriate work scenario to use.