Describing experience of team work in IT industry (Admission Essay Sample)

‘Fidelity Management and Research Company’, planned to launch a software infrastructure development program for making ‘the existing process of its fund performance management application (FPM)’ efficient. Fidelity appointed ‘Sapient Government Services’ as the IT services vendor to work on the software infrastructure development program. Fidelity’s key objective of initiating the infrastructure development program was to implement Scalability, Integration, High performance, Attribution, and Risk management in the global asset management staff and distribution channel verticals. Fidelity approved a budget of USD 35 million for the project and it was decided to launch the pilot phase of the program in Raleigh. Raleigh was one of the places where the program was initiated and other parts namely- Boston, Galloway and Bangalore were to follow for the further implementation of the program. I got an excellent opportunity to lead a competent team of 6 consultants at Raleigh. 2 out of the 6 consultants had joined us from India. It was the first onsite project for our team and we were geared up to face the challenges that lied ahead of us.
In the first stage of the project, my team worked on developing the service architecture to set up the data repository of the FPM (fund performance management) application. The service architecture supporting the data repository was to be set up across each business vertical in the organization. The service architecture development work was a new challenge to my team because; the architecture was expected to perform as a data repository for numerous applications functioning across different asset classes used by portfolio managers.
Being new to the subject of developing ‘investment performance and risk management systems’ for a buy-side firm, I was aware that my team members will require grounding on the subject. One of my first challenges in the project was to develop the knowledge base of the team members, through training. I met this challenge by using my professional knowledge about investment performance and risk management to train the team members. Due to the high level of understanding portrayed by the team, I can say I was successful in ramping up elementary level knowledge of all performance entities in the service architecture. The performance entities included - GIPS composite, aggregates, time value of money, and performance measurement of portfolios, load-adjustments, Rate of return calculation, attribution concepts and risk-adjusted performance factors. I also focused on the other part of the challenge which was to meet the service architecture deliverables within the set deadline. In order to set the routine right, we adopted the agile methodology and this working style really put us on track with outstanding performance results.
In the second stage of our project, as we started interacting with other stakeholder teams about the solution architecture; we began to receive prompt feedback about the shortcomings of the new architecture. In the presence of legacy architecture, the other teams found our system incompetent and inflexible for holistic integration across the organization. The negative feedbacks lead to an aura of uncertainty among the top management and key stakeholders of the project. I believed I was on the right track because my team was consistently delivering on the primary objective to consolidate performance data into a single repository and to make it accessible to downstream applications. We made a seamless consolidation of the FPM application data repository possible across all the business verticals by using code snippets, documentation and supported data transformation in multiple formats.
During the second stage of our project, we also ensured the adherence and implementation of certain quality parameters in the new architecture. These parameters were – (a) To keep the software quality consistent across the entire architecture, (b) To adopt the pair programming practice to streamline the project deliverable timelines and quality, (c) Proactively test and try new methods and tools to enhance software industry standards, (d) Usage of automation tool for service testing that lead to 30% time reduction in the testing phase.
In the third phase of our project, we dealt with the challenge of ‘Source control and Defect analysis tool integration with the Development environment’. One of my team members found the missing link in the trial version of a particular software that could resolve this challenge. On the initial success of the trial software, I approached the management to approve a licensed...