My task involved preparing a major component of a tender submission at work for a university infrastructure project. During my initial briefing, I received a high-level overview but quickly realized I lacked crucial documents, namely, the detailed client RFP and historical data on past projects with similar scopes. This created a bottleneck where no matter my effort or personal investigating, time was wasted and hence the company's resources.

Driven by anxiety about proving my immediate competence, I initially hesitated to ask clarifying questions, spending an afternoon struggling to piece together the submission by finding the clients information and example tenders in the company wide files .

I believed that if I was able to complete the work on my own without requiring help I would appear to my supervisor as more reliable and a valuable team member. Initially I attributed this event to a lack of confidence as I had only recently begun working at the company. 

In retrospect I have realised that my struggle was simply due to a  systemic breakdown in communication. The necessary documents had been circulated in an internal team email chain that I had not been CC'd in on. Bringing to the surface a weak point in the communication protocols within the team structure. This in turn resulted in a waste of company resources and unnecessary stress and anxiety about my own performance.  

Unfortunately, this situation is not isolated and a subordinate's fear of disapproval is a well-known barrier of communication processes within organisational hierarchies. The "status barrier" is considered the most significant barrier in management and can only be mitigated with improved trust between employees (Borcherding, 1978). 

The overall experience highlighted a difficulty rooted in both my personal approach and the firm's processes. My personal belief that competence equals independent execution was challenged. In a viable system, competence is measured by the ability to use all necessary and relevant information to a task/job, which I was not supplied and had no way in accessing on my own. I recognise that my initial fear of annoying/disturbing my manger contributed and delayed my ability to complete my task but was also caused by an unsustainable and flawed information sharing system.

The most critical lesson I learnt is the necessity of information and not being afraid to ask more clarifying and precise questions. I understood that proactive inquiry is not a sign of weakness, but a fundamental skill in project management and team environments. My future intention is to improve my own system by treating information as the critical supply chain. I plan on confirming and noting down the exact documents and resources I should be using for my work as well as the line of communication I should be receiving them on. This changes my professional stance from passively waiting for information to assertively ensuring I have all documents and resources necessary for high-quality, efficient work.

I was assigned the complex monthly status update and cost application in a large P6 schedule for the Infrastructure Planning and Control (IPC) team. In the context of global project management, P6 is the leading software program for reflecting and tracking real world construction progress and financial expenditure into a trackable and reportable program.  The task required creating new and updating current activity progress. Additionally, I needed to accurately allocate committed costs, and update cost overruns, a process that demanded high precision due to the direct impact on financial forecasting and earned value management tracking.

The manager initially requested a turnaround of 2-3 days, which led to initial pressure and self-doubt about my ability to complete such a complex task both quickly and flawlessly.  This expectation reflected a monochronic professional culture where a strict adherence to timelines is prioritised.  Ultimately, I made the conscious decision to prioritize data integrity, taking four full days to complete the update and add extensive quality control checks to ensure 100% accuracy in the logic and cost data.

The core difficulty encountered was the cultural tension between the required efficiency and quality assurance under a tight deadline. The task took an extended period of time due to the time intensive process of manually cross-referencing between the P6 database and external financial documents whilst keeping notes of what I did, in case it was wrong. My personal belief was that the accuracy and reliability of my work, was the most important aspect. Although I took an additional day to complete the work the manager was satisfied and impressed at the quality of the updated costs and program. This experience highlighted that in professional practice, reliable and trustworthy results is more important than speed of work.

A concept often seen within intercultural and global professional practice where "saving time" and sticking to deadlines from controlled cultures can clash with the flexible nature of fluid cultures (Dubberke, n.d.).  Noting that recognising the work cultures that colleagues align with and addressing them accordingly leads to max efficiency and cooperation within the company. 

The key lesson learned is the need to negotiate and communicate extended turn-around periods based on quality assurance requirements. I learned that for complex, financially sensitive tasks, it is crucial to communicate a realistic time estimate, a skill that has now been improved as I know the rate at which I can produce high-quality work. My future intention is to identify my colleagues' work cultures and proactively address them through effective communication. For example, relaying the change in deadline by framing the extra time not as a delay, but as a commitment to quality output.