2011 Company Accounts Crisis

 Another thrilling example of a once-in-a-lifetime challenge happened about 11 years ago. I was at the banks for 13 years and was just a senior specialist and did not have a formal and official managerial title. My management experience was limited to leading roles in project and task groups in the division at the time. Honestly speaking, I was happy with the geek role since I have always thought I wasn't too much of a people person when it comes to managing. Anyway, important things happened that year. I was working as a part of a team with very experienced members, especially the middle and upper management. Those who once designed the first generation were all transferred to other posts at the bank. Unfortunately, the only person with all the technical details of the business was me. The Company Account Statistics Report was meant to be published exactly on the 15th of November, as it was made part of the official statistics calendar that very same year. Before then the publication date was flexible and usually two months after the new one. Another problem was that we couldn't find the storage media (CDs) with which we used to collect the data,  as the person responsible for the data collection was transferred to our post in London on short notice. All these, we have encountered when we only had about two months left to the publication deadline. After a thorough search when we finally found the CDs we had only 50 days left for production. So I made a decision to take the initiative and the responsibility for the publication on the advertised date. I made a broad and simple plan. I would process all the data myself by using VBA codes instead of letting my colleagues do it. Otherwise, they would have to use the VB application and process each form individually which would be time-consuming. Processing some 15000 individual forms in batch would seriously increase the speed and lower the labor time as well as lower the errors. So I wrote some 2000 lines of code in a week and processed the whole data myself. The only thing left to my teammates was to upload the data in the individual forms into the database. Since I did not want to lose time learning the specifics and break the integrity of the VB application, I found the solution to batch filling in the forms with error-free data again with the VBA codes. Then I let my colleagues batch process and upload these forms into the database. We ended up with some 13000 individual forms that could be used for the production of Company Accounts Statistics for that year. We had about three weeks left, and with some overtime spent, we could manage to finish the whole study two days before the deadline. We were all content since the CBRT did not have to lose its credibility by not publishing on a strict deadline. I was very happy too since I  succeeded to keep my promise to deliver on time, and for solving an obvious crisis. By taking the initiative, I ended up proving that I could operate the whole system very efficiently through meticulous planning.
I learned an important lesson from all these incidents. We had to carefully plan everything, especially the human resources. Later on, as we still did not have enough expertise in such a short time, I decided to do an HRAnalytics study I devised to determine the shortage of workforce, and I could manage to persuade the upper management and secure five posts to be filled with recruits to train for our work.