Other Blogs and Press Release

Check out my colleagues blogs of the adventure:

http://cscghanadeiva.wordpress.com/

And here is the final press release from our work in Ghana:

http://icvonline.org/2012/05/press-release-team-of-ibm-experts-delivers-recommendations-to-ghana-ministry-of-health/


- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.

Location:Canberra, Australia

Other Ghana 8 blogs

Check out my colleagues blogs the, Deiva has links to everyone's blog!

Goodbye's always suck.

Got up early this morning to finish packing and check I have left nothing behind, had breakfast with the team who share the excitement of either returning home or continuing the adventure. It's always sad to say goodbye, I really enjoyed working with everyone and I'm going to miss the heat, the ultra laid back and relaxed style in Ghana. I invited my teammates to visit Australia and look me up, I hope they do.

The hotel we stayed at, sorry this shot was taken last night, and I was too distracted this morning to take another:



I've grown used to waiting anywhere from 1 hour to 2 hours after ordering a meal for it to arrive, so I'm not sure how I'll go at home where it will feels like the food jumps on you it will be so quick. I'll even miss grilled chicken and Jollof rice :)

On the way over, my driver enlightened me that Grasscutter is a delicacy in Ghana, and many countries and even regions outside Accra do not allow Grasscutter to be killed and eaten. I'm very pleased I tried it, but I won't miss it :)

Note to my team mates staying on - jewelry at the airport after you pass through customs is significantly cheaper than in Accra, but they only accept USD or Ghana Cedis, no card services at all. On the other hand wood carvings are ridiculously expensive compared to the markets.

Addis Ababa airport in Ethiopia is a medium size airport, probably double the size of Ghana's airport. It is also a smoking airport which was awful until my flight number came up and then. I could move into the gate area which was non-smoking. Lucky I checked the flight number and time as my ticket says 2:10am, but the flight was actually midnight!! Anyway, my carry on luggage is 180grams lighter as I helped myself to a double decker bar :). Oh, and no selectable movies or in-seat tv screens on these flights :), lucky I made my way through "The Hunger Games". It's kept me interested, but it's not a great book - jumps a fair bit and doesn't develop the characters much. Maybe it's aimed at a different audience, either way, I havn't been inspired to read the next 2 books in the trilogy. It's kinda junk. Battle Royale is far grittier and more believable, and it's a movie.

The movie on the plane was "7 Days in Utopia", it was ok, but failed to really stir the sportsman spirit that those movies are meant to do. Filled in some time anyway. Those passengers interested in the film, could watch their nearest screen in the roof or on the exit row wall.

Made it to Bangkok airport, damn time goes slow for the first half of long plane trips, then the second half seems to improve. Well, this is a much bigger and more modern airport. I was delighted to find I could get a haircut, shower and a massage all on the 4th floor at the day hotel. No, I did not take the happy ending option, but not for lack them asking I don't know how many times. She seemed to get the point when I pointed out my wedding ring, but even that seemed a poor excuse why not. Different Values I guess. I didn't realize that even in the airport, after paying the price, about $120 all up, they still wanted tips. All I had was an Australian $10 note, so they took that. Oh well, it was worth it to be able to freshen up and to face the last part of the trip, one more nearly 9 hour flight, and then a 50 minute flight to Canberra and I can finally crash!

Yippee! I got an exit row seat by the window for the flight from Bangkok to Sydney. ahhh, leg room and quick exit at Sydney! This flight should feel a bit quicker than the last now.

First Movie I decided to watch was Chronicle. Where do they make this rubbish? And who in their right mind funds it? Followed by The Vow which I thought would be a comedy but turns out to be a chick-flick, ugh, think I'll pass on the movies home.

So instead, I wonder if my team at home will mind if I hiss at them when I want their attention, or making a kissing noise to tell them to watch out for something? Maybe we could pray together before we start the salary reviews? I'll miss some of the other "eeeaaa!", and "eh?", and a chuffed "oh! oh! oh!" expressions used in conversation and meetings as feedback to what is being heard too.

I never had to think about where to get a taxi Accra, they constantly came past and tooted and hissed to get our attention. Having to wait for a taxi is going to be a rude reality. I won't miss hearing "I'll be right there", and either not turning up at all, or coming hours later :). But even that was fun!

Our favourite Ghanaian song was called Azonto (I think), and I bought the CD, along with a few other songs that grew on me. I hope I did remember to pack it. Ghanaian's enjoy a music style called Hip-Life which is a mix of Hip-Hop and High-Life. It's only a matter of time before the next Lady Gaga or someone rips this off and we see something catering for Western tastes.

It's about now I'm looking out my window and waving to Dale and Cassia as we fly over NT and Central Australia. Hey guys, couldn't you hear me calling out? Raw hide!

With a couple of hours to fill in before we land in Sydney, I thought I'd try one more movie, Haywire. It has some big names, but unfortunately, still unrealistic rubbish.

Yahoo, Sydney! It put a smile on my dial to be able to switch my phone back on and get a 3G connection, and to see a bunch of SMS messages come in. Thanks Al for your SMS! It's like coming home to old friends!

Made it through Customs with all my souvenirs too! I declared everything. And showed everything to the Customs officer and it was ok to bring in, great! Last flight to Canberra now, how exciting!!

Phew, they don't give u much time at Sydney airport. I make it to my gate with 2 minutes to spare by the time the transfer bus arrives and gets us around to Domestic from International. And I thought 2 hours would be plenty of time!

Flying in the dash-8 back to Canberra the first thing that strikes me is how green everything is here in Australia, the red fields of Ghana replaced with green. The second thing is how neat our housing is built compared to the sometimes random looking clusters of buildings in Ghana.




- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.

Location:Ghana Airport

Gold five to Red leader, we have a hit!

Presentation day. I'm getting up early so there is plenty of time to get ready.

The published start time was 9am, and we kicked off about 9:30am, the room was full again, and all our presentations went well, stimulating lots of healthy questions and discussion. Our risk presentation was very well received, having less text on slides and providing some local proverbs meant our presentation was easier for the audience to digest, but the real clincher was some of the bold recommendations we made where we pinned recommendations to a specific role, or made recommendations for who should be held accountable for finding someone to fill a role. This last action is part of the Ghana culture - as IBM is held in such high regard, there was an expectation we would make some bold statements, and this earned us the respect of the audience. Phew, we didn't know how that was going to go down.

When it came to question time, we had a number of people make passionate statements that supported our recommendations, hooray, we must have hit a few chords, it so easily could have gone the other way. But the real proof is what happens next. Without taking our work and managing risk as part of an ongoing activity, this work will quickly become redundant. We feel confident they will - especially some of the comments that have come back.

15 minute break, our group was up next:




Following the main event, we provided gifts to our drivers and key stakeholders, and then needed to hang around for final interviews with the film crew. I was hoping to pickup some final souvenirs, and by 6:30pm I got my chance, yippee! I picked up the last of the souvenirs I needed, and then headed to the mall where the team had decided we would have dinner at Rhapsody's, and Italian and African restaurant. Given I'm flying out tomorrow, I played it safe with my meal, and got spaghetti bolognese - sort of, the bolognese was more orange than red.

Sri, Thiago, and Deiva finally work up the courage to wear their Ghanaian shirts, given to us as a thank you gift from our customer:




Finally, Happy Birthday Shaun!! For Saturday.

- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.

Location:Eight Rd,Accra,Ghana

'Twas the night before Christmas...

We finished our final document at 8:30pm this evening, phew! Comparing it to other risk plans, it certainly stands up as an excellent plan, coupled with what we hope will be a stellar presentation tomorrow. I needed a boost this evening to finish those last grueling paragraphs, it was like lead weights attached to my arms. So I dared the milo in a can. It was alright. I had terrible visions it may have been milo and soda, but was relieved to find it was just normal milo and milk, no fizz.





That's Thiago hard at work correcting my mistakes by the way. Made more difficult as it was a German keyboard -QWERTZ not QWERTY, and don't even get me started on the accented characters! Just one of the challenges of working in an international team.

Speaking of which, I learned this week why all directions given to taxi drivers don't use street names etc. The streets do have names here, but you describe where you want to go as left by the woman selling yams, or next to the big round about. Even from the other side of the city, they know what this means. OK, can you guess why? Well, the majority of the taxi drivers can't read. Anyway, back to work.

Presenting starts at 9am, so I will be up early to iron a shirt and pants, polish my shoes, scrub up, read through our presentation again. We will be the last to present this time, so we will have the tired audience to dazzle and liven up. I know our work is good, but no one will see that until after the presentation, hence we will be judged based on what happens tomorrow.

We are scheduled to finish by 3pm, but we all expect that to extend. I'm hoping to grab a few last souvenirs tomorrow night, which will be my last chance as I'm one of the first to fly out Sat noon. I am not looking forward to the 46 hours of flights and airports to get home, that is just cruel! I must have upset someone.

At the same time as being excited about presenting tomorrow (4 weeks of intense focus and dedicated work goes on show) it's also the end of this chapter which creates a bit of a pensive atmosphere. We've just scratched the surface of getting to know Ghana, it's culture, and it's norms. The weekend trips were critical to understanding what it's like to be Ghanaian, which was then applied to our work, and business contacts during the week.

So, a man dies and goes to hell. When he gets there he sees there is a hell for every country, and he can choose which one he wants to go to. So he asks what happens in the Australian hell, and is told well we put you on the electric chair for an hour, then we put you on a bed of nails for an hour, then the Australian devil whips you to within an inch of your life for the rest of the day. Not being too keen on that, he then asks about the American, German, Brazillian, Hong Kong, Indian, Singaporean, Chinese, and Irish hells to learn they all offer the same treatment. About now he notices a long line-up for the Ghanaian hell, so asks what happens there. He is told, we put you on the electric chair for an hour, then we put you on a bed of nails for an hour, then the Ghanaian devil whips you to within an inch of your life for the rest of the day. "But that is the same as all the others" the man protests, "why are so any people lining up"?

"Because there is never any electricity for the electric chair; the nails were paid for but never supplied, so the bed is quite comfy; and to top it all off, the Ghanaian devil used to be a civil servant. So he comes in, signs his time sheet, and then goes back out on private business for the rest of the day".

I thought I would share that Ghana joke with you, it came from a book called "Ghana - Culture Smart!" by Kuperard. Very useful book if you are planning a visit to the Gateway to Africa, Ghana.

- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.

Location:Independence Ave,Accra,Ghana

Wednesday, T-2 days.

"A team of IBM's top experts..", that's how a preview of a press release for our final presentations on Friday starts. To be printed in papers across the country. There was lots of discussion by our customer around the wording to be used elsewhere in this document, but the high esteem and prestige IBM is held with was acutely obvious. Plenty of pressure on our results, the IBM CSC program is seen as world class and our deliverables the catalyst of success for the next 5 years of health reform.

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

Stay on target...

Phew, another big day preparing our final deliverables. Aside from lunch, we didn't see sunshine today, thoroughly buried in documenting our process for risk management, deciding what we want to include in the main body, what goes into an appendix. The hardest job is starting with a blank page and adding content. Once content is there, it's easy to criticize a document, but the real work is building it from nothing. Once we overcame that blank page hurdle, the content started to materialize quite easily, then our new problem was ensuring we kept our content relevant. Everyone on the team has read sections of documents titled "Strategy" and been frustrated that the text bears no resemblance to strategy at all, but very much tactical or operational guff. The last thing we want is our customer to read an example like that and dismiss the rest of the document as if the author doesn't know what strategy is, why should the reader trust they know anything about the rest of the topic at all? Our document should be good, but tomorrow is going to be another busy day.

Lunch today was very interesting. I tried another local Ghanaian dish called FuFu with chicken soup. Fufu looks like Banku, but it is made from Plantain and cassava instead of fermented maise and tastes more like mash potato. It's not sour, and is served in spicy soup, similar tasting to a Laksa. It was good, but very filling. I need to upload pictures from my iPhone to show you, but unfortunately WiFi access is still not working at the hotel. I also had the fortune to be able to try Grasscutter today as Gerrard set the pace for the Australians by braving Fufu in Grasscutter soup. Grasscutter has the same texture as goat and similar but much stronger flavor, very gamey. The taste stayed with me for about 30 minutes after, even the spicy soup couldn't kill it :). I can't wait for a beef kebab on the BBQ and lamb chops!! I think I dreamt of them last night :)

For those who have kept up with the blog, you know a Grasscutter is a giant rat in these parts, and considered a delicacy. Here is a picture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Grand_aulacode_male.jpg




- Keep on Rockin'. Dwight.

Location:Morocco Rd,Accra,Ghana