What was one decision you made that went against common practice but resulted in exceptional success?

Benefits Realization Business Case Decision Making Risk Management

Abdul Nazeeb Belgaumi Associate Engineering Manager| Virtusa Bangalore, India

What risk did you take, and what did you gain?

Posted: Jan 24, 2026 2:49 PM

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Kimberly Whitby

PMI Team Member

Online Community Specialist| PMI Newtown Square, Pa, United States

Hi Abul - to get the conversation started, would you mind sharing a decision you've made that went against common practice? It would be great to get examples form others!

Posted: Jan 27, 2026 9:30 AM

Abdul Nazeeb Belgaumi Associate Engineering Manager| Virtusa Bangalore, India

Hi Kimberly, happy to share an example;

As an automation manager, I noticed the team was spending a lot of effort creating detailed test reports and dashboards to show progress, while our automation suite itself was unstable and flaky.

Instead of increasing reporting and visibility, I made an unconventional decision to pause new feature automation and focus entirely on strengthening the foundation; refactoring the framework, stabilizing CI pipelines, and removing flaky tests.

For a few sprints, it looked like output had slowed down, and there was little visible progress to showcase in meetings. However, once the changes were complete, execution time reduced by over 62%, false failures dropped drastically, and release confidence improved.

Leadership initially didn’t notice the effort, but they quickly noticed the results: faster releases, fewer production defects, and higher trust in automation. That’s when the impact became more visible than the work itself.

I stopped optimizing for visibility and started optimizing for impact. No one noticed at first,, but the results spoke louder than credit.

Posted: Jan 27, 2026 9:48 AM

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What was one decision you made that went against common practice but resulted in exceptional success?

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