Ethical Decisions

Sometimes in business it is necessary to make ethical and difficult decisions. Effective leadership encompasses vision, anticipation and inspiration. It demands insight, team-building, ethical grounding and the willingness to make a difficult decision. This is both my definition of leadership and the foundation for the most difficult assessment in my professional experience.

Prior to my promotion as Team Leader for the Online Operations in LD Telecommunications, the President of the company was leading a project to develop a billing system for our post-paid telecommunication service. His role was to provide the outsourced consultants with the scope of the project and facilitate the necessary information to build the system. Unfortunately, his lack of experience in this type of assignment led the project to partial failure. The project was reassigned to me and I should decide whether to continue developing the system and pay the remaining balance to the contractors or continue to take our losses.

I had to approach the problem with vision and anticipation. I knew that members of the contracted development team were not very happy with how the project was being managed. My job was to analyze the unfinished system and decide if it could be used to complete the development of the system. After some days of hard work, I decided to meet with the team members and share the news. The system could be saved but the scope of the project had to change without changing the settled price. I decided to use the system for different purposes. We used the base structure to develop a CRM and Order Management System for our prepaid services. This would help us to have an integrated system that helped us manage our customers, their online purchases, and to decrease our response time for order activation.

After reviewing the risk and opportunities of the project with the President, he agreed to proceed with my recommendation in order to optimize the system's potential.

I began by coordinating the implementation of a series of new policies and procedures. In doing so, I replaced the team's negative morale with focused enthusiasm for the project's new goals. I enhanced the team's communications by using an online forum environment