Stories from Work-7

 Let me share two examples to show how experience counts.

First one is from my LIC days. It was in early 90s. LIC was still doing payrolls manually. No spreadsheet softwares, no payroll management systems. I was working in OS (Office Servicing) Department and there used to be A2 size green ruled sheets on which I had to make salary calculations on a monthly basis. For first few months, it was very hard. There always used to be a difference between debit and credit side. Being proud of myself, I hesitated in going to my boss for help. On days, I wasted hours on finding where the difference originated. And after wasting lot of time, when I used to surrender and go to my boss for help, he asked about the difference amount. On hearing the figure, he used to tell me to look in this head. And most of the time, difference used to be in that head of account. This was his experience speaking. After a year or so, I could also guess the culprit area and then I realized the importance of experience.

Another example is from bidding domain. We usually tender out high value jobs. In jobs requiring creativity and expertise, relying on just cost is tricky. So we used mixed bidding in one such tender. Weightage was divided between creative and financial bid. Based on the marking in both the bids submitted by each party, final ranking and work order was to be placed. Initial proposal was to give 70 % weightage to creative bid and 30 % weightage to price bid. One senior official had a different view, hunch or insight whatever you may call it. He changed the criteria to 60 % weightage to creative bid and 40 % weightage to price bid. When marking was done, his hunch proved right and we noticed that the job would have gone to a different party if we had stuck to 70-30 ratio. Here price importance was increased by changing price weightage to 40, and another bidder won the contract. Experience does count.