Team Mafia’s road to victory in Asian Paints Conundrum 2020 -By Aakash Jaiswal from XLRI Jamshedpur

Asian Paints Conundrum is an HR Case Competition and being students of the HRM program at XLRI, we wanted to challenge ourselves and apply our learnings to a real business problem which in this case was to plan the end to end HR requirements for a greenfield business vertical that Asian Paints was starting.

The moment of victory is still afresh, as the Judges declared our team name MAFIA as the winners. All of us were awestruck. The moment was surreal. This was the first time we were adjudged winners of a National level Case Competition. Since the competition was being aired live on YouTube, the moment when the results were announced we received many congratulatory messages from our XLRI batchmates who motivated us and shared our success. This doubled the happiness that we bore.

Knowing that it won’t be easy

The biggest challenge was the fact that the case competition submission, Asian Paints Conundrum, was during our exams. So, effectively managing time as a team was a critical success factor. Secondly, the problem statement required us to delve deep into the details and understand the industry - which in turn meant that our solutions had to be in accordance with the characteristic features of the same. So we began with understanding the industry, benchmarked current processes of the competitors, then looked for best practices, and finally got into calculations to arrive at exact numbers or range wherever required.

Embracing the challenge like Mafias

Conflicts are an inherent aspect of any team primarily because of the diversity in thoughts. As a team, this is something we have learned to use to our advantage. Whenever there is a conflict, we try to understand that each of us has the same end goal and the best interests of the team in mind. This helps us keep our egos aside and understand each other's perspectives.

Having a forte is very necessary. The team's forte was understanding each other's individual capabilities and then taking up different parts of the problem. We then calibrated and pieced together solutions to present the big picture.

Knowing the rivals and the challenge

A total of 9 teams made it to the finale of Asian Paints Conundrum. I feel team Armada from XLRI was our toughest competitor because of the robust quantitative analysis driven insights presented by them.

We realized the panel of judges from Asian Paints was highly invested in all the presentations. Their questions were very detailed and were related to the focused elements of the slide. This is actually a testimony to the fact that the judges were taking our recommendations as seriously as we were presenting them.

Here are a few tips you must always remember:

A structure of the presentation is extremely important.
Any recommendation should be backed by a “WHY”.
Mock presentations before the event day help a lot.

Check out other stories and experiences here:

Aakash Jaiswal - XLRI Jamshedpur

(Batch of 2019-2021)

A student of HRM at XLRI, he is recognized for his ability to set up remote teams and establish robust systems. He was a core member of team Mafia that took home the winning trophy of Asian Paints Conundrum 2021.