My BBC Interview 2010 - Questions exposed

Last year I experimented with the market as I was feeling rather undervalued and not appreciated at work, more so looking for positions that offered more senior roles that wasn't being made available to me at the time. One of the companies I applied to was the BBC.  BBC is considered the grandfather of broadcasting not only in the UK, but quite possibly world-wide.  They have quite an intense application process with setting up an online profile, online testing with scenario videos, psychometric tests and the lot.  Should you pass all the screening, you will then be offered an interview - I'm happy to say I made it to the last stages, competing with 3 out of an original batch of 30 applicants - however, we all know how that ended :-) Not successful, bottom-line, BBC thought I was carrying too much process baggage and not agile enough; as well as I didn't have prior line management experience which is what they were seeking for the technical team leader role.

Anyway, my interview was a surreal event because I wasn't applying for one role. They laid out the following possibilities to me: Technical Team Leader, Project Manager, Programme Manager, Scrum Master.  So I was subjected to a varying degree of questions. In retrospect, I think I came off a bit too confident, strong, and determined to change the world.

I will now share with you my responses to the questions that opened the path for the face-to-face interview:

Q1 - We’re looking for strong technical leaders: excellent at designing & delivering complex solutions while at the same time motivating & inspiring a team. Please give an example of an IPTV/On-Demand/Interactive TV project you lead from concept to deployment (2000 character limit).

[BSkyB Anytime+ HD On-Demand/Interactive TV (1943 characters) 2008-2010]

A highly visible project to secure NDS’s position in the Middleware market for the foreseeable future, involved seamlessly  replacing an existing Middleware (OpenTV) on multiple STB platforms (deployed 2 million+ homes), with no noticeable difference to the user, plus the addition “Anytime+ Progressive Download”. A new Middleware & device driver model, consisting of 80 components with a 200-person development team geographically dispersed: 2 UK sites, France, India & Israel; as well as working with suppliers worldwide: Broadcom, Amstrad, Samsung, Thomson, Wipro, Red Embedded & S3Group. The project is often described as “not only changing all four tyres on a car whilst you’re driving, but also giving the engine an overhaul & the body work a re-spray at the same time!”

I had global accountability as Middleware Dev. Owner, overall project management responsibility for delivering feature completeness within the set timescales; managing a team of senior architects (design authority), 200-person development/integration team to deliver a backlog of 200+ work packages.

My engineering background allowed me to build rapport with development teams, gaining project-wide respect, as highlighted:

• Quickly gained architectural design knowledge, allowing me to hold technical discussions with the customer without needing to include senior architects.
• Participated in customer defect review meetings in negotiating issue severities, assigning ownership & allocation to component teams (usually the job of chief architect)
• Conducted impact assessments of change requests, before passing on to architects for review (Software Migration, Download, IPv6)
• Mentored Hit Squad teams consisting of senior engineers, in resolving critical issues (steering performance improvements, providing tools to find memory leaks), sometimes spending late hours with engineers going through code (shared OpenTV knowledge)
• Produced much-valued technical status reports on critical issues
• Proactively drove the setup of the end-to-end system for home field trials allowing people access to latest builds via software download
• Appreciated the technical challenges placed on engineers, often siding with the engineers that “it cannot be fixed any sooner without consequences”

OPTIONAL ADDENDUM: Additional Responses to Q1 from a senior engineer, technical leadership perspective

[Speaking EPG – Interactive/Accessible TV (1987 characters) 2007-Present]

This example may not immediately appear to be relevant to the question, however I think it’s worth sharing as I strongly believe that strong technical leaders must possess great vision, determination & an unfailing desire to succeed through persistent perseverance.

For the past 4 years I’ve created a following both inside & outside of NDS for the need for accessible, usable EPGs targeted at the aged for independent living, blind & partially sighted, dyslexic & the illiterate by spearheading the concept of a Talking EPG: a STB with built-in speech synthesis.

This was a project “greenhouse” outside of work hours, purely out of interest & a passionate desire to add value to people’s lives. Despite many obstacles - I had little networks & influencing-power, NDS being a large company – I pushed the idea from a concept, simulator, demo to prototype on real hardware to engagement with customers - in the years to date have now inspired a team of 7 people contributing to my greenhouse project.

I kept abreast of Middleware roadmap (as I was working in the IPTV HeadEnd group at the time & wasn’t involved with STBs) & decided to experiment with the platform. Working closely at the driver level, I ported an open source speech engine, complete with voice dictionaries & databases & got a STB to perform real-time text-to-speech synthesis.

To provide a realistic experience, I partnered with another project that was working on a simple zapper middleware, providing the platform exposing the service information, menus & graphical text representative of an EPG experience.

Having integrated the two projects together, we were successful in demonstrating a simple zapper EPG in 2007, speaking out menus, key presses, channel information, reading a book from a text file, speaking out the time, changing different voices, etc.

I created an open API framework that could be used for integrating commercial speech vendors, & published the API for recommendation into the official middleware product, where it’s currently under review, the original audio stream requirements were approved & included in the current product build. The feature has also been added to the product roadmap, making it a success.

I’ve persistently spreading the message, still seeking external interest, all in the background. I suspect this will remain a passion should I end up with the BBC!

[DirecTV USA – Interactive TV (1974 characters) – 2003-2004]

This project can be summarised as porting of a DVB stack to DirecTV’s DSS APG domain, implementing a new EPG, resulting in excess of 200K lines of code in ~6 months, currently deployed in 30 million homes.

I was part of a core team of 3 people that eventually grew to a team of 12 as the project matured. I was heavily involved in the gap analysis phase, where I had to understand the DSS system, the structure & APG protocol creating a mapping to our existing implementation in the DVB domain. We inherited EPG code from a previous project that was quite mature & exclusive to the DVB domain that included conditional compiles for different projects, for a PVR profile. The code was huge, complicated & new, it meant investing time to understand the code, identify all API dependencies, highlighting APIs that needed changing, defining new APIs, identifying the useful & useless code, removing conditional defines. It also involved understanding & correcting the architecture model of the EPG.

The biggest challenge for the EPG was on developing the complicated new features of DTV, whilst at the same time reusing as much of legacy code as possible. I led, through a team effort, the de-construction of the EPG, fixed the architecture to adopt the model-view-controller pattern allowing us to work in isolation, independent of the user interface screens, the model & controller could be written separately. We identified further services that we could make independent, called “engines” that provided the screens with the functionality desired. We were able to develop the UI, work on the services & controller in parallel, & with a few integration points synchronised could deliver incremental functionality & experience together. I also took the lead in defining the shared services that implemented generic algorithms that served the needs of many similar use cases avoiding the need for repetitive code.

Of particular note, the program grid was the most complicated code of all that I’d written from scratch in two weeks, comprising over 30000 lines of code, which to this day, has remained largely untouched. We maintained a strong preference to maintaining the architecture UML model, the engines, controller & model were updating along with important sequence diagrams so that everyone on the team would have a source of documentation for reference.

Q2 - Using the example that you provided above, tell us how you ensured your project met the original business requirements & was of acceptably high quality.  How could you have improved it further? (1000 character limit).

BSkyB Anytime+ HD - On Demand/Interactive TV (1073 characters)

High-level features translated to system requirements, then to product-use-cases, realised through Work Packages (WP), a self-contained unit that can be tested & verified tracing back to original requirements.

Code quality: MISRA standard, Zero Compile/MISRA/Lint warnings, 100% API & Line Coverage, 65% Branch Coverage, 100% test mapping, used static analysis from KlocWork, Blackduck for open-source violation.

Multi-level test approach, unit tests, component-group, Middleware suite of 1000+ regression test cases targeting 98% pass rate, stability & performance tests – build fully automated, testing at all levels driven by continuous integration tools.

I helped resolve key defect process problems: clarified severity criteria (Showstopper, Major, Minor); published a workflow for importing customer defects, defined project-wide defect process. Reported metrics regularly, target zero showstoppers. Managed regular root cause analysis & iteration reviews.

I instigated specialised on-site teams (Hit Squad) fixing critical issues; evangelised Microsoft’s “Eat your own dog food”, enabling home testing catching critical issues early.

What would I change?

Start full stack testing early in lifecycle, better traceability at full stack back to requirements. Do continuous delivery at full stack.

Q3 - Using the example that you provided above, tell us how you went about instilling/ enforcing agile development methods where they did not exist, or reinforcing where it did. (1000)

BSkyB Anytime+ HD - On Demand/Interactive TV (1090 characters)

NDS adopted Agile company-wide in 2006, changing the physical layout of the office-space providing floor-to-ceiling whiteboards, break-out areas, meeting rooms for Scrum & associated software tools; as well as a manifesto for software development.

Mature process: WP backlog, incremental feature development, continuous integration, parallel delivery to customer, releasing early, releasing often, 6 week iteration cycles that evolved naturally to 3 week cycles, later to 1 week deployment cycle. Development teams are self-managing, owning local backlogs, managing team progress independently. Regular meetings, metrics & reporting were already in place to gauge project progress (Velocity, Planned VS Actual, Burndown).

What agile methods did I change/reinforce?

• Identified waste in QC, turning 3 weeks QC cycle to 1 week, synchronised with our release cycle. The problem was that defects raised in QC were 4-5 weeks out-of-date with the current build.
• Recommended customer-support team on-site to collaborate, resolve & fix key issues on the spot, unblocking QC.
• Managed daily Scrums, XP, brainstormed, mentored engineers, getting hands-on with debugging & code reviews.
• Kicked off one-roof-integration teams bringing together geographically dispersed engineers & testers to share the team experience.

Review: Dissecting the Hack: The F0rb1dd3n Network by Jayson E. Street, Kent Nabors, Brian Baskin

This book is interesting in that although it tells a fictional story of how two hackers innocently & accidentally fall upon and help prevent a serious threat to national security, everything about the technology is all real, and explained in good enough detail to make anyone interested in security threats, wanting to learn more. 
The book is divided into two parts: Part story, Part references. The references can be used again and again to sharpen your skills in being more security conscious or paranoid in your every day activity, beware of the bit-trail you leave behind.

Ideas...kick-start

I plan on sharing my ideas I've had in the past as well as those that I'm considering now. No, I'm not mad for sharing these because I'm actually looking for people to comment, criticize, guide, mentor, advise, collaborate or even find partners in pushing some of these ideas forward.

For starters, I thought I'd kick-start with some of my own similes/metaphors on ideas as touched on in an earlier post. I will start by quoting from What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World and then share my own:

Ideas are like ______________________________________

because __________________________________________

therefore __________________________________________

• Ideas are like babies because everyone think theirs is cute, therefore be objective when judging your own ideas ideas 
• Ideas are like shoes because you need to break them in, therefore take time to evaluate new ideas
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect the local environment, therefore consider changing contexts to get more diverse collections of ideas
• Ideas are like bubbles because they easily burst, therefore be gentle with them
• Ideas are like the measles because they are contagious, therefore hang out with other people with ideas if you want to get them yourself
• Ideas are like spider webs because they are stronger than they appear, therefore don't underestimate them

Now, for my own, not-so-great examples:

• Ideas are like ice cream because under the slightest heat it melts away into non-existence, therefore be prepared to handle the heat when your ideas come under scrutiny

• Ideas are like seeds because seeds must be nurtured and cared for to grow into something beautiful, therefore ensure you provide the right environment for your ideas to seed & grow

• Ideas are like a house of cards or playing Jenga, where the house/tower can fall crashing down by the mere extraction of a seemingly innocuous piece, therefore be very careful in doing your homework or analysis before sharing your idea for scrutiny....

I have six months to live...

"You caught us at a bad time Muhammad...  I have six months to live, maybe two years if I'm lucky to survive chemo..."

Valerie couldn't contain herself much longer. I had unknowingly walked into a very distressing situation at my neighbour's house yesterday, around noon. I had a spare B&Q voucher (15% off) that the old man Tony is always interested in and I'd unknowingly walked into a family situation dealing with really harrowing news. Me, with my jokes of them leaving their doors wide open, with the keys in plain public view for all to see, their lack of security and how I wouldn't have the luxury of being that safe in South Africa...I didn't have enough time to read the situation, and then Valerie lay that bombshell "I have 6 months to live..." and I was shell-shocked. I knew they had been to the hospital for the results, but I wasn't prepared for that result!

I immediately went over to Val and gave her the best sympathetic hug I could muster. Moments of silence. I didn't know what to say. "I have 6 months to live, cancer of the blood they tell me. Acute Myeloid Leukaemia (AML). All of this from a sore throat! It's all over the body...I will have to undergo intense chemo for 6 months, stay at hospital for a month at a time. I'm too old for a bone marrow transplant...We're waiting for the hospital to get back to us....I'm not going to visit you in South Africa Mo!" 


What do you say to someone in this situation? Val is in her sixties, Tony in turning 70 this year. Val & Tony live on their own, they're absolutely 100% independent, much to my admiration. They've travelled the world, they're more active than me to be honest. Truly hard-working British commoners these folks are.  We've been neighbours for going on to 5 years now, but we've only got to know them after 2 years - Tony had seen me doing some really tough landscaping out in my front yard, I'd been toiling away for weeks and he'd come over asking me if he could take the dirt away for a job he had (will save me the 100 quid). It turned out he was a retired electrician, doing odd-building jobs and he was about to close shop nearing 67 years old at the time. We hit it off nicely from there, he helped me with completing my garden and then helping out with odd jobs I had at the house, very recently helping me with my roof, flooring, bathroom shower and driveway gate in my preparation to get the house in order for the move back to SA....Val and Tony have won our respect, love and friendship. When my parents were over, my father and Tony had a great time together. I wish I'd grow old and independent as Val & Tony were...

Val & Tony are always keen on holidaying, taking breaks and were quite spontaneous. This year alone they did a stint in Canada, the Bahamas & Holland. Not once would they complain of their old age or ailments (compared to most Asians), they maintained a sense of dignity, secrecy and civility - very prim and proper, very English-like.  And when news as sudden as this hits you, you really are left speechless. There were no previous symptoms, all Val had was a sore throat. She'd seen the GP, been for X-rays, blood tests - nothing out of the ordinary. GP was letting it ago, but Val insisted she didn't feel quite right, "I knew deep down something isn't right" so GP requested full blood tests, and then it showed up.

I was unprepared for this situation, finding the right words was difficult. In situations like these, I guess just being there, your presence is enough.  I couldn't mention anything religious, not because I'm Muslim and they're not, but more so because although they are Christians by name, Tony has no patience for religion or God, so I couldn't mention typical cases like "God has a plan for you, put your trust in God", etc. I just hope Val can find something to hold on to over this massive transition - maybe it'll be God, maybe something else, but somehow she has to come to terms with this news. "Sleep on it, you're tired. Take each day as it comes. You know we're here for you at any time, just let us know how we can help....Is there anything you wanted to do that you didn't have a chance to....Yes, actually I'd love to see the London Eye...but if chemo is going to start next week, I won't get that chance"...The London eye, right in our own backyard, and they've not had a chance to go there... :-( I will try to help them realise this in the limited time I have in UK.

I've got a month to go before the relocation move to SA, leaving friends to deal with this difficult situation. I'm gutted really...

Looking at Tony and Val with different eyes yesterday, it seemed like they'd aged ten more years...bad news can have this effect on you.  Tony needs to be strong, I fear the worst: he will resign to the inevitable and his active life as a handy-man keeping himself fit despite his age will tail off...I pray he finds something to hold on to...

I can only imagine what last night must've felt like for Val...getting old is one thing, finding out you have a life-threatening disease and knowing you're not fit-enough to see it through, probabilities of survival are low, is another thing altogether....

This is a first for me, I'm still trying to come to terms with it.... In the past I've seen people who were sick, you just knew they're not going to live long (my once healthy brother-in-law who had severe stomach cancer dying at the age of just 32) I'd been home to SA specifically to see him, he was in a terrible state, I knew then he wouldn't survive, you could see what the chemo did to him....

But this case is different, the opposite end of the spectrum. Here is a person just over twice my age, who has lived a full life, who on the surface looks as normal and healthy as any person in her age, to be given the death notice. Being in your late 60s you somehow prepare yourself, but you think you have time to prepare...

Review: What I wish I knew when I was Twenty by Tina Seelig

Tina Seelig runs the Entrepreneurial Thought Leadership at Stanford, a very impressive programme with guest speakers from all the top companies sharing their experiences of past failures and successes - invaluable insights freely available for download.  If you're seeking out knowledge to be a successful entrepreneur, then I highly recommend you visit Stanford E-Corner website.

Back to the book: Very well written, easy language in direct conversation-style, brings out the message in clear and simple terms. Although this book could be seen as yet-another-self-improvement-book-on-leadership-innovation, in that it provides stories and insight's into other people's experiences & resultant lessons learnt; it is unique in the following aspects:

• References to real classroom exercises being taught at Stanford. Don't be fooled into thinking this is a student text, the example challenges can be given to any company team and will be equally, if not, more challenging than the classroom experience
• Tina touches upon subjects that are generally considered taboo
• There is an element of realism, practical advice that is good food for thought
• Topics are light-enough to leave the reader time to analyse his/her own personal situation (For example: the bit on "Failure Resume" (FR) really got me thinking, so much so that I exposed version 1 of my draft FR here)

Another topic that got me going was from the chapter "Turn Lemonade into Helicopters", Pages 129-130, which I'll quote below [I am still working on my own similes :-)]:

...In my course on creativity I focus a great deal on the value of recombining ideas in unusual ways. The more you practice this skill, the more natural it becomes. For example, using similes or metaphors, to describe concepts that on the surface seem completely unrelated offers tools for revealing fresh solutions to familiar problems.....Teams are asked to come up with as many answers as possible to the following statement:

Ideas are like ______________________________________

because __________________________________________

therefore __________________________________________

• Ideas are like babies because everyone think theirs is cute, therefore be objective when judging your own ideas ideas 
• Ideas are like shoes because you need to break them in, therefore take time to evaluate new ideas
• Ideas are like mirrors because they reflect the local environment, therefore consider changing contexts to get more diverse collections of ideas
• Ideas are like bubbles because they easily burst, therefore be gentle with them
• Ideas are like the measles because they are contagious, therefore hang out with other people with ideas if you want to get them yourself
• Ideas are like spider webs because they are stronger than they appear, therefore don't underestimate them

All-in-all, this is a useful addition to my book collection. It will no doubt be used time and again as a reference.  Don't be fooled by the title, the lessons taught are relevant to anyone throughout their personal/professional life, 20s, 30s, 40s and beyond...

Writing a Failure Resume

This week I completed Chapter 5 of Tina Seelig’s "What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World”; and was left thinking about a particular topic that I found quite interesting: writing a “Failure Resume”.  Other people have already blogged about this in the past (ETL, Tina's own blog, mistake bank) sharing similar impressions as I. But what I’d like to do here, is present my very own failure resume just as Tina has done in her book, but adding a little more detail: in addition to summarising the failure, I will include the lesson learnt and future objectives for improvements.

I find Tina’s book a fascinating read, it’s as if the book was especially written for me. I can really relate to Tina’s advice, how I wish I could’ve attended a proper institution like Stanford. I try my best to follow Tina’s ETL series (Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders) program, how generous of them to share this valuable information with the world, for free!!  Whenever I read books on entrepreneurs, I get really excited. I have this feeling in my inner core that this is me, this is something I can do, this is someone I definitely want to be - but haven’t yet taken that leap of faith yet, although I can feel it’s just around the corner.  I plan to share my past ideas with you in another post, just in case you think I’m a nutter, a wanna-be, just a dreamer getting high on books ;-)

So back to this “Failure Resume” and what is so interesting about it??  Most of us concentrate on all the successes and overlook the past failures that probably influenced us more than we’d like to admit ourselves, and could possibly have accounted for future success.  It’s good to keep a record of past failures, and in my opinion, could come in handy during interviews when you’re quizzed “What are your weaknesses?”, “Give us an example where things didn’t go the way you wanted”, etc.  Failing that, it is a good tool for reflection and planning your next growth stage, both personally and professionally.  

To excel and succeed, to reach the next stage or challenge, one has to take risks, try something different - and don’t be afraid of failure. One should embrace failure, because with failure, comes wisdom. A mix of successes and failures provides one with a good balance, well rounded experiences that you can use to your advantage.  The great companies, according to Tina, look for people with a diverse background and talent, willingness to learn, experiment and failure, but wise enough not to repeat past failures.  I, myself, am still searching for a company that embraces this culture - well it is the secret sauce of Silicon Valley after all!!

[April 2011]: So version one of my Failure Resume is below (I found this quite a difficult exercise to complete, this is certainly no 10-minute exercise. In my case, I’m not that experienced, I’ve only got 10 years professional experience, and most of the failures can be rationalised and turned up-side-down to be seen as necessary successes because of my over-arching desire of learning as much as possible, from as many different areas as possible - to be a Jack of all trades in Software):

MUHAMMAD J. KHAN

Professional Failures

Jumping ship too early. My desire to broaden my horizons can be seen as a failure of not giving enough time to stay for a long enough period to establish myself in the role. I find myself changing roles once I feel that I’ve learnt enough or seen enough, eager to seek out the next new challenge. I’ve learnt that you really should allow yourself at least 2 years in a job role before moving onwards. After all practise makes perfect. Just because I excelled in one project doesn’t necessarily mean the next project will be any easier. This failure can be seen as getting bored too quickly, impatient.  It’s a tricky one because you can find yourself falling into the trap of becoming too complacent, watching the years go by and then realising you missed your chance to make that exit you so desperately need right now.

Being made redundant. I left my country of birth after one year of working as a graduate engineer, to work in Ireland. I’d not been overseas before, and neither did I have enough workplace experience (my first company mostly employed people from the local university - we were all friends). It took me a while to settle in with the new company culture, moreover, the company was doing poorly in terms of projects, so for the first 6 months I literally had no real work to do. Although I made efforts to take on work and was proactive, I fear I wasn’t loud enough, blending quietly in the background.  When work did pick up and I was assigned to a good project where I thought I’d played an important role, I falsely assumed that my job was secure in the wave of redundancies taking place. Not so - I was made redundant (they train you to say “my job was made redundant”) - I see that as a personal failure on my part, not doing enough, not contributing to core projects as a failure.  Thankfully, the subsequent 8 years that followed, I made it a point to strategically move when my spider-senses detected a scarcity of work on the horizon.

Falsely assuming managers understood my expectations, not selling myself enough & working too hard. I recently came off an intense project where personally I felt I did an excellent job, even in my appraisals had consistently exceeded my managers expectations.  I assumed that I’d naturally move into a more senior position seeing that I’d proven myself on more than one occasion, doing work proactively, working long hours early into the morning, etc.  Oddly enough, I wasn’t given the appreciation I assumed was coming my way.  I did not communicate clearly enough to the main project stakeholder of my expectations, once the project was over, I found myself wandering, in limbo - all that effort, all my hard work wasn’t good enough to be noticed. Seeing that I wasn’t getting what I wanted, I decided to leave the team, leaving a hole behind now filled in by three people. A new project was kicked off, but it was too late for me to board that ship!  I realise now that expectations must be communicated clearly, and also, you should try NOT to do too much (if you’re overloaded, shout about it, don’t take it on), there’s more important things to worry about than work.

Refusing to play the corporate game.  Perhaps it’s because of my naivety, but for a few years I’d refused to play to corporate game of falsely smiling and being nice to managers, pretending to give a damn when in fact you don’t, just because you want to climb the corporate ladder.  Yes, you need to get on with all your colleagues, but when it comes to work and execution of tasks, one should be judged on only this - the value one adds to the bottom-line.  Maybe I have a cultural or religious bias, ideals that prevent me from mixing and socialising?  I’ve learnt that if you don’t allow yourself a little flexibility without compromising on your core principles, you need to develop some “street savvy, be street-smart” in the workplace, to make the connections and silently manoeuvre to positions advantageous for you.  Don’t expect others to do it for you, you need to consciously make the effort and plan ahead - take time to determine the corporate culture, identify the teams/people you’d rather not get involved with, have a plan of attack targeting the people you’d like to end up with.

Academic Failures

Not doing my best, not 100% focused. I used to be a straight-A/B student, but at university, I dropped the ball in my third & final years (the most important years!). Staying on my own with friends, having unrivalled freedom to experiment, even the distraction of girls, I ended up not attending lectures, avoiding the lecturers, and just sitting for the exams with only a month’s preparation, gaining a 3rd class pass (66% if you average the 4 years), when I could’ve easily got at least 75% had I been focused.  Whilst I did successfully qualify, I regret not using the vast amount of resources that were available to us (e.g. experimenting with business projects, becoming more involved with the university staff, etc).

Poor relationship management. Whilst some of this can be attributed to the unnatural cultural legacy of Apartheid, and that it needed some mental fortitude for students from backgrounds such as myself to break through the invisible barrier between different people (black/indian/coloured/white) - I failed to build any meaningful relationships with the faculty staff at university, so much so, that when I enrolled for a Masters in Ireland, the professor in charge was not entirely positive in his recommendation.  We were not on talking terms socially, I’d only visit him when a report or presentation was due - we did not have a mentor/student relationship.  At university the class would be naturally be separate into racial groups, we didn’t really interact with each other.  Had we learnt how to make these relationships in university, then working in a multicultural company would’ve been a piece of cake.

Personal Failures

Not knowing enough - choosing the wrong career path.  Perhaps I’m being too hash on myself, but one of my failures goes way back to when I finished high school, the period where you decide what to do for the rest of your life.  I feel had I known better, I could’ve made different choices that would’ve set out a path so different to where I am today, although the present one isn’t so bad.  Nevertheless, I failed to do the research, the serious searching that was required at this important juncture of my life.

Not executing my ideas, not taking enough risks.  I have always had ideas that could’ve led to something great, if only I’d acted upon them.  Either I take too long to experiment with the idea, or lack the confidence to push it through, take it to the next level.  I have executed on a couple ideas, but this was within the context of a safe environment of the workplace.  If I failing to execute, I can’t call myself an entrepreneur. I need to stop making excuses (no time, work, family, no money) and take a chance.

Rewarding myself.  I over analyse and keep putting the needs of others ahead of mine.  I am also too hard on myself, and very self-critical. Personal time and space is important, and is a right of an individual. I don’t allow myself enough of this, and also have failed in keeping my interests up-to-date, for example: making sketches, doing some programming (i.e. learning new languages outside of work), or taking time out to be active.

Relationship management. There were times when I found difficult to separate out my work persona from my family persona - and expect my family to be run just as I’m running a project at work, to an extent that I’ve been told I act like a general in the army, too strict with the wife and kids, with too many expectations. Over time, I’ve improved and trying hard to change :-)

[October 2016 Update]: Five years onwards and I've had a relook at my failure resume, read here!