A rookie’s advantage at work

When I just joined my second company, I had an opportunity to do an implementation of a software customization on customer’s back-office server.

I had never done anything close to it. It was only a month or two since I joined the company. Naturally many people raised concerns about me doing such work. Nevertheless, I was willing to try and my manager graciously gave me the go sign.

First step was setting up the test environment which was already quite the challenge. People who had the access to provide such environment was abroad and wide spreaded in different offices. I had to figure out who to reach out to and also had to convince them to provide the resources needed.

After setting up the VM I went into testing it and did it 5 different rounds. In the process I revamped the existing documentation into an interactive guide with screenshots.(On an excel! Japanese customers love excel documentation)

Actually I located 2 parts in the customization code written in official guide and corrected it during process.(Big, pleseant surprise for the authors)

On the day of delivery, a few errors occurred on customer server but I already have experienced the same and checked how to either debug or confirm that nothing is wrong during the 5 rounds of testing. The erros did not surprise me and customers gained confidence in my demeanor.

Customer still uses that interactive guide after more than 2 years passed. I gained lots of trust with several internal stakeholders involved which led to many opportunities internally.

I have put in the kind of effort that most experienced professionals would not put in due to confidence. This led me to getting much more done than what was expected.