Question

• What is your preferred approach when having to solve complex problems?

• Sometimes it is very difficult to make a decision where there are number of alternatives available. Describe a situation where you found it difficult to choose between different alternatives? How did you eventually arrive at a decision?

• How do you decide which are the most important things to do in your job and which are the least important on a particular day/week

• Can you think of a recent example where you were under extreme pressure at work to produce results in a short time? Explain what steps you took to motivate yourself to be on time?

Answer 1

1. While solving the complex problems, always try to breakdown the problem into smaller sets. This will always help you in understanding the complex problem in a better way, hence providing you a way to solve the problem.

In this approach, you always have to keep a track of each sets, their resolution and about how these sets are interlinked with each other. Many IT Industrialist follow the same way to solve the problem, allowing them to better understand about the situation/complex problem and finding out it's way to resolve it.

2. In a situation, where you have many alternatives to choose, makes your mind tangled for making the final decision. It is obvious as human mind takes many analytical factors and key points to take the final decision which is beneficial for him/her.

Few months back, I was in the same dilemma where I have to choose an mobile phone in the market where dozens of brands and couple of mobile phones available for each brand in same budget range. It's a common situation which everyone face multiple times in their lifespan. So in my case, I first jot down all the points which I actually want in my mobile phone and then I started to compare each mobile phones with my requirements list. This is very much simplified method to make decision and help you to find what you want.

3. This has a very simple answer. I have been working in an E-commerce company where I have to quickly decide the priorities of my tasks, in order to report my managers. For this, I first jot down my tasks or maintain a tasks sheet, then along with those tasks I also mention the ETA for each task. This allows me how much time each task will take to complete. After that, I just simply mark the priorities as 1(Top Priority), 2, 3, 4.... and so on till the least priority tasks.

The priority is set on the basis of the Urgency of the task, if I want to submit the finance report then it is high priority task, while a product upload is lower priority task.

4. I was working on website backup, and suddenly my boss told me to provide the Monthly MIS(Management Information System) report in 10 mins. For me it was a really big task which I have to complete in short span. So I followed the following steps to get the things done:

a. First I hold my work of website backup, and calmly jotted down the points that I need to complete the MIS report.

b. After that I collected the data from the database, asked my colleague to share respective data ASAP and tried to centralized all data on Google drive.

c. Then I started working in creating MIS report and my goal was to finish in 8 mins, so that after MIS I can resume my website backup task and then go to the meeting with reports.

d. The smart way is to first map the requirements, the solve parallelly each requirements hence reducing the time estimation. And most important never think that any task is impossible, such situations always help you to find the best out of you. This was the thing that kept me motivated.