'I Am Constantly Involved In Processes Which Require Building A Bridge Between Organization And People' - Pragnesh Pahuja, IIM Bangalore - Best30 - Class Of 2019

Being an Associate with less than 1.5 years of experience, I was not expected to lead a project completely but due to some unexpected resource crunch in my company, I took the responsibility to lead and deliver a Speaker program impact and ROI analysis project for a large pharmaceutical company.

The client had significantly increased the focus on the Speaker programs (A different type of promotion where a Key Opinion Leader talks about the company’s brand to fellow physicians). The traditional promotion activities for the pharmaceutical company includes detailing, sample drops, speaker program, display, print, email, and TV campaign. The client wanted to know incremental sales impact and Return on Investment (ROI) of Speaker Programs on the national level.

Challenges: Time/Budget Constraint, Data Clarity and Exposure to new technique-

1. General Constraints: Due to budget and time constraints, the resources assigned to this project were not enough and I had to deliver this project with minimal resources.

Approach: I followed a rigorous approach by optimizing the time and resources in each stage of project, and building risk mitigation technique to identify, assess and prioritize the risks involved in each step.

Since I knew the deliverable date of the project, I adopted reverse engineering to create a work breakdown structure and identify the project’s activities and deliverables. Dependencies between tasks were identified and a plan for review and rework activities was created for Business rules implementation, design, code, unit testing, system testing etc. Key resources were determined for all the activities and key milestones were identified to track the progress of the project. The project schedule was updated on a weekly basis and shared with all the stakeholders involved.

2. Different types of Data and Data Integration: Since the number of promotional channels were large, the amount of data we got from different vendors was huge and contained different fields.

Approach: We followed RIGOR to generate a layout by which we defined a formal process to understand the data with its relevant fields. RIGORR states that we should follow R for rhythm, RACI (Responsible Accountable Supportive Consulted Informed), and requirements where reviewing of data was done by creating data dictionary, I for Ideation where brainstorming on data was done, G for goodness of data where we performed quality checks for all the data and inputs received, O for Operationalization and Output QC where data queries were resolved and potential data risks were assessed and R for Ready-to-go where data is ready to be used for creating master data.

3. New Technique and approach: Since the project was new in terms of technique (Test and Control) and its approach (Matching based on the selected rule from error-variation technique, Euclidian distance, and Propensity score methodology), it was very important to understand the concept of the approach before implementing it on the project. Understanding and identifying the best technique was important to get accurate results.

Approach:
• Storyboarding of the process: It was important to have a storyboarding before jumping onto analysis so as to know what all things we can get from the data which will be helpful in achieving the accurate output.

Results: Leadership experience and subject expertise development
• Since the approach and technique were new to us and company, we acted as trainers for different teams to help them in understanding and implementing this approach.
• Being my first project as a lead, I was appreciated by higher management for handling it with a lot of constraints and delivering the project on time with accurate results.

 

When was the last time someone relied on you? OR What did you do which was purely for someone else - a truly selfless act.

I was a part of Nirmaan, a National NGO during my undergraduation in BITS PILANI. There were several initiatives which were taken for people from a nearby village called "Bhas". The problem we faced was village people for which we were undertaking these initiatives were not realizing the importance of it. There was no connect between Nirmaan and the village. There was no rapport and less communication between the villagers and volunteers working for Nirmaan.

Towards this end, I co-founded a project called “Participative Community Development (PCD)” which acted as a bridge between the village and other developmental initiatives run by us. In this, we tried to build rapport with villagers by interacting with them on a continuous basis, understanding their problems and making them aware by conducting various events. The sole purpose of this project was to build a connection and trust with villagers so as to make them understand the importance of our work.
Within 4 months of the launch of PCD project, we gain trust and modified our existing projects based on their needs. We also identified some of the leaders who took ownership of those projects and are currently handling those projects with full efficiency. This project helped in making other initiatives of Nirmaan sustainable. This was the self-less act which I performed because giving something to society is not everything but understanding what actually they want and then providing them with enough opportunities to make themselves sustainable is a big success.

 

What is the one thing you can claim to have some level of expertise or depth of knowledge in - it could be anything - a subject, a sport, a hobby, a venture, an initiative which has led you to do deep work in that field?

In terms of hard skills, I am well versed with few of the analytical techniques such as forecasting, response modelling, A/B testing. I did extensive work on forecasting process while working with an analytics company and made myself equipped with Markov model forecasting, time series forecasting, analog forecasting. I have developed several models and have worked for a long time to achieve some level of expertise in it.

In terms of soft skills, I am a people's person. I co-founded the BITS Pilani chapter of Participative Community Development project, a social initiative to understand the community and identify future leaders to take up the work of developing their villages under a national NGO. This was really helpful in making me an expert in analyzing people and understanding their behaviour in some way. Over time, interacting with a variety of people ranging from global clients to mentees, company officials to social workers have significantly added to my interpersonal skills and provided me with a diversity of perspectives. From that time, I am constantly involved in processes which require building a bridge between organization and people.