How did i fare in a challenging situation

I am playing the role of project manager for close to 8 years and have definitely faced a lot of challenging situations in my career. Somewhere down the line i got into the feeling that i have figured it out all and am able to handle any situation. Surprisingly, i found myself in a strange situation and was very close to having a break down two months back.

As a manager and leader, i was managing a project. This project had a strange clause of warranty support for six months. In other words, if there is any issue is there in their production environment because of either standard product issue or enhancements we developed, we were required to support and resolve the issue.

When we started on the warranty support, we had a fairy tale relationship. We (two members from customer and myself) used call ourselves as three Musketeers . It continued that way for a while till real problems started hitting in production environment (there are multiple reasons and am not getting into details).

The fairy tale started becoming complex, because in addition to this, they were also bringing in gaps in implementation (not found during testing) and expecting us to cover them as well. Here i was handling all these combination of issues and fighting with customer almost everyday to say NO to the issues or correct the solution accordingly. Saying YES and correcting the solution was easy to handle, but saying NO started creating stress internally. We need to be tactful, polite and logical while saying NO. This combination started taking a lot of energy from me internally.

I probably never said so many times NO to a customer in such short duration. Please remember the problem for customer is real . We are saying NO from the perspective of my organization scope. There were times they were questioning professional ethics and organization delivery quality. Also at times, the calls were very aggressive to the extent of being irrational.

So here i go, identified the root cause of my near nervous break down. Unfortunately this did not absolve my accountability and commitments to the organization. I still have to find a way out to control the situation instead of situation controlling me. As the time for the warranty period closure reached i started approaching the issues using the following guidelines and framework.

1. Stop saying NO, but take your time and do the analysis and provide appropriate answer (it could be NO in the end).
   
2. Start realizing that there is an end to every problem and just stay together till the problem dies its natural death.
3. Start looking around you and see that every one has one problem or other and just accept them and deal the best way you can
4. Do not take anything personal, if we cannot fix it, state the same and if we can do it, just do it (the nike way)
   

Besides these four principles, i got great support from friends and family in this period and that allowed me to pull through this tough period. I realized their value at times of crisis. During Christmas holidays, i just left my laptop at home and took off on my vehicle to South India tour. Somehow i landed up visiting so many temples in those four days, i could never imagine. Believe me it was not planned that way, but it really helped to get over some parts of my stress. Then my brother came over to visit me, and this also helped a lot.

One lesson i learned in the process never believe that you faced every possible scenario. There is something new waiting in the corner and how you survive that one, determines your success. In the above case, i still do not know how well i fared part, but i can say this much... I survived...

If not, images like the one on this article.. will ensure that..we survive....