“I had an opportunity to demonstrate my capabilities at supporting the strategic direction of
my employer while I worked for the Telstra when for a period  I ‘acted up’
as a manager  in the NBN Transition  Assessment Team 
.
When I started  the volume of issues  that the team was dealing with was very high
and causing considerable stress and tension. A big concern for senior management was that our
team was not making the planned progress which was due to the non availability of data
.
Despite the problems, I was told by senior management that it’d be fine if I just kept things “in
a holding pattern” until the manager position was filled on a permanent basis. However, I saw
an opportunity to make my mark by improving our processes.

Thinking strategically, I thought that I could devise a more efficient ways of accessing the data which was being handled by an external vendor in India and was not proceeding quickly. I spoke to every member of the team individually and asked for three ideas for how to better handle the situation.
My strategic judgement was that of the ideas developed , the best one was to create a an inhouse data store from the histric data in the datalake which we still had access to that would apply to
around 80% of our issues and enable us to catchup rather than waiting for all the data to be available in india
I allocated the coordination of this to two junior staff members  as I
judged they had both the time and the best skill set to carry out this task.

This was a big success. Our speed at dealing the issues improved dramatically,
giving the team breathing room to allocate sufficient time to catch up with the remaining issues with the Indian data