Ardiansyah Putra: Bridging the gap between internal and external parties 

You are a Project Manager at Quincus. Could you walk us through what a day in your work involves?   

My role is mainly to carry out the deployment after we have signed the agreement with the customer. Since I am in the Delivery Team, I regularly engage with the customers on the deployment. I work closely to understand their needs and form an agreement with the primary goal of ensuring that their expectations are met.   

Let us know a bit about your background and how your academic and career trajectory has led you to your current position.  

I have a degree in Information Systems. Like my current role, we become the bridge between developers and engineers to the customers.  

Rather than having the customer approach the developers directly with their concerns, we provide clarity in terms of the technical understanding—that is where my role comes in to translate between those two parties.   

Internally, it also requires a technical assessment of our customer’s needs: How can we implement that? How will we code these? What is the algorithm for this? As a project manager, we liaise and communicate with customers to fill in those gaps and coordinate with our team internally.

For the last ten years, I worked as a PMO (Project Management Officer) in another company and project manager at an Indonesian startup before moving to Quincus. I was involved in operational matters, but it is the same concept in coordinating and establishing communication between two parties.  

As a project manager, you may have the option of choosing to work in the technical side or communications. At what point did you decide to become more involved in communications?  

I was in the Commercial Team in Quincus before switching over to Delivery.

Through communications, I gained a lot of experience in knowing how to handle people, grow my connections, and network with other companies and industry professionals. Being involved in communications also increases my confidence in talking with people and handling diverse groups and companies.   

What’s the most exciting thing about being a project manager?   

The most exciting thing is when we can bridge between different expectations. 

For example, the customer has a tight deadline. Meanwhile, internally our developer and product teams require a substantial period to develop custom features. This is the part that gets me excited—we need to predict and provide optimal solutions.  

I keep track of our internal tasks to determine and assess risks. We need to foresee that coming to give a better timeframe to our customers. That is the most exciting part for us to anticipate and have foresight. 

Do you have to follow up with our customers after deployments? 

We have customers already using our platforms. Each time they may have questions, bug issues, requests for customizations, or additional data, I coordinate with them to get whatever they need from us.   

There are urgent requests that we have to fulfill. In those cases, that’s where my technical side becomes useful. I managed to resolve their pressing concerns and did some simple programming for them.   

We provide them with immediate solutions according to their priorities. We do our best to accommodate what they need for urgent matters. For example, our customers are testing the API. Our developers require at least a day to have an extensive review of their issues. Therefore, it can be useful with my technical background to assist them independently and promptly.  

What will you say is your most rewarding experience?   

For me, it is when we exceed the expectations of our customers.

That is the main satisfying thing that happens. The customers are satisfied with the deliverables, and I am also able to manage the expectations internally. Our internal team is granted sufficient notice period to develop the report. Still, the customer already got what they need through our workaround and can then wait for the actual development in other areas.