To give you another interesting snippet from the release, "Since 2008, nearly 1,500 IBM employees based in 50 countries have been dispatched on more than 150 team assignments in 30 countries". So I encourage all IBMers to consider joining the CSC program sometime in their career, it's an experience you won't forget, and for me the appeal was being able to make a direct difference for someone, going beyond making a donation (which is also very good and needed), but I wanted more. I hope our final deliverable satisfies and lives up to the significant reputation IBM CSC holds.
Today was spent presenting our findings to a working group, prior to the big event Friday. What we've learnt from this, is our presentation is boring. So we spent an hour out of our afternoon to spice it up with Ghanaian proverbs, and photos from the experience. We finished up at 7pm, but met up with other teams to work on an IBM task given to us, to review the work we have done on the IBM CSC assignment, and eventually finish up at 9:30pm. We play hard on the weekends, but we work hard during the week. Tomorrow is the last opportunity to finalize our work now, Friday morning the show opens. I promised to wear my Ghana shirt today, and I did:
If you take out all the exotic food and sites we've experienced, this assignment has provided equally incredible insights into how IBM operates worldwide (all the same issues folks), and peoples different working styles. I am leaving with at least 3 new ways of addressing work thanks to my team mates. In addition, there is the experience gained with working in a totally different culture, with quite senior people, and needing to achieve an in-depth result in a very specific timeframe. An experience not easily replicated.
- from my German colleague - it would have been easier if it was all in German.
- from my US colleague (from New York) - We should have worked through the night in the first week to get it all done.
- from my Brazillian colleague - you know, we should Salsa in the breaks.
Everyone has been working relentlessly on this project, and all of us have applied a different coping strategy to the work, it's been very interesting to be a part of, I like Brazil's calm, but methodical and relentless approach to the problem - Thiago has kept our stress levels at normal, despite the workload, and has infected the group with calm determination. Thiago's quiet confidence and results remind me of Ricardo Semlers auto-biography - radically reformed Semco in Brazil that have influenced corporations since, if you are interested his book is called 'Maverick', and it certainly challenges the 9-to-5 grind. Thiago is our happiness officer.
Amy from New York has been our driving force, pushing us to get just a little more done each day, and thank goodness, or I wouldn't be writing blogs now, we would be working through the night. Amy has also been our communications officer, and handled all the meetings, driver pickups/drop offs etc. Amy has a wonderful upbeat fast-paced approach to everything, she brings energy into the group and gets us over the line. Amy demonstrates how one person can make such a difference to the performance of a team, PMs note - fake it till you make it, but you are the key to the climate in your project :)
Petra from Germany has been key to ensuring our work was firmly on target to meet the deliverables and goals of the SOW. Petra provided executive focus to the assignment, but despite her seniority in her day job, has allowed us to work through problems and guided us to the right conclusions rather than taking over and providing the answers. I've been thinking how I an apply this myself, it takes a lot of patience and a quiet self-assurance to get right, and I jump too fast to just giving the answer so we can move on. Petra told us a story of a professor she studied with while working on her doctorate, where this professor advised if you average just 2 glasses of wine a day over a year, then you are classified as a drunk. Does that make Petra our brilliant, but resident drunk? I guess that makes Petra our loyalty officer :)
And me, well the group say lots of nice things about me bringing the project management/risk management methodology and guiding them through it. I've enjoyed presenting our work to our stakeholder groups, and in the early days leading stakeholder discussions/interviews that we mined risks from. I'm the project manager :)
I wish I had more time now, high performing teams are addictive to be a part of. What helped us is having a clear and common goal from the start, leveraging off one another's strengths (no one person can always be right), being prepared to look at problems from another's point of view, consider alternatives, and being focused on the outcome. This is a good lesson learned for how to document and apply this for project kick offs.
Enough already.
- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.
Location:Duade St,Accra,Ghana
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