Author: GKR Hayu

How I Quit My Job

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I have left my job voluntarily twice so far. My last one was due to health issues, engagement to my now husband working in New York, and also accepted for a full scholarship for my MBA in the States. So deciding to quit my second employment was much easier to make than my first employment. For this post, I’d like to share the circumstances and decisions that I took in leaving my first job. I am sure there are many of you thinking about leaving your job and either can’t decide or afraid of the possibilities and changes that it brings. I sat down, asked myself several questions which I tried to answer as honestly as I could. Nobody needs to see your notes, so don’t be afraid to be honest to yourself!

When I Grow Up….

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If you ask the 6 year old me, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would answer “A hacker! So that I can rob a bank remotely!” Yeah, I blame those tv shows… Growing up, I did nothing special in computer related stuff though. I wasn’t one of those 11 years old hacker. Just had your average class using a computer, with those floppy disks. Oh God, that makes me sound so old! When I got into high school, I grew some interest in politics. Indonesia was undergoing a major political transition from Soeharto to a new president so there were so many things happening. I remember asking my teacher what she’d think and she answered “Somebody will probably shoot you!”

Raising Team’s Morale

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In the first year of my full time employment, I walked into the office with a big smile on my face everyday and greeted everyone I walked past with a “Good morning!”. It wasn’t until I got assigned a really big, difficult project loaded with difficult client & office politics that I would have headache every morning. I felt my energy level steadily decreasing as soon as I left home, and drained completely when I walked into the office, resulting in a grumpy face and my morning greetings dissapeared. I was agitated and impatient all the time, and I had difficulties sleeping. When I woke up, it felt like I hadn’t slept at all. Pretty soon my health started falling and I had to take an unpaid leave to recover.

My best friends and I

My Partners in Crime

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I’m one of those people who don’t have much friends growing up. Even a close friend usually drifted apart after a few years. It got worse when I started studying overseas, where I moved to a different country every few years. I tend to lose contact with them when I moved. During my school days, other students seem to have different interests, so I didn’t talk that much either. I was that girl who always ate alone during lunch hours, but I didn’t mind at all. Things turned around when I started my first full time job in Jakarta. The IT company was full of people around my age, and we had common interests like online games and anime. I had more friends than ever. Instant BFF On my first day in the company, I was assigned to a desk next to a new Business Analyst who came 3 months before me. We were assigned together for our first project, where I started my Project Management journey. Maybe because we were equally struggling in our …

Project Manager & Business Analyst Deadly Combo

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Requirement is the base of any project, cause you can’t (or shouldn’t anyway) create plans and schedule when you don’t know what to make. A definite and concise requirement is critical for a Project Manager to produce realistic and accurate (close enough, at least) project schedule. Therefore the teamwork of a Project Manager (PM) and Business Analyst (BA) is very crucial in a project. When I started as a Junior PM, I had to learn things on my own by chasing down relevant seniors, sitting in a lot of requirement meetings and researching things. After 3 years, my BA friend and I were coaching and supervising the newcomers. We found that in most project, the two roles were often in conflict with each other. Common Business Analyst prejudice against Project Managers 1. Do not have the initiative to understand high-level project requirement documents. This was true with some PMs and I still don’t get why they do this. It is understandable to refer to your BAs when you are new, but when you are still doing …