Member-only story
Go for it! and then adapt
This story is from 2005. I was less than a year out of college and working at Hewlett-Packard in India on the HP OpenView team. Among other things, I was assigned as the junior engineer to work on Application Response Measurement (ARM) standard based offerings from OpenView.
We had a request from the sales team in Taiwan to help close a multi-million dollar sales deal, by giving the customer training on our ARM offerings. The ideal person to offer this training was Chinmaya Manjunath. Chinmaya was the senior engineer working on ARM and our subject matter expert, but unfortunately he had a motorcycle accident and had fractured his arm (Ironic as it may seem, but the ARM expert had injured his arm). As a result it looked unlikely that we would be able to honor the request from the sales team, as it would be too risky to send a college fresher out to train a customer on an area he was pretty new to.
I wanted to see if I could convince the management team to send me anyways. So I created a quick crash course on ARM with a presentation, handout material, quiz etc.. and set up a meeting with the entire product team. It has been a while so I do not remember how good the material was and if I would approve of it today, but I went ahead with it anyways. The training went well and I was selected to go train the customer in Taiwan.
