Marián Schwarz

After a wonderful weekend at the Anilao beach club in the Balayan Bay and a trip to Taal volcano the team made my Monday B-Day unforgettable. Lunch at Jolibee (all staff singing Happy B-day), diner at Japanese restaurant (another Happy B-day song ) and finally b-day cake at the guest house with the team (of course with a song :) ). Well ... they are just the best and made the day really special.

Now we approach the end of our project and finishing deliverables we have been working on for the past few weeks. This week we made a great progress. We have spent hours in workshops with the local team and successfully completed proof of concept for the future county brief page IRRI will create. After todays meeting with our client I have a very good feeling that we will deliver a valuable outcome.

Workshop with IRRI team on our Proof of Concept.

Meet with our client Michele Weldon

And some well deserved pool action after work ...

Are you wondering what CB means ? Country Brief ... the ultimate one-stop-shop web page with consolidated country related information that will help IRRI staff prepare even better when they travel or host visits. Our days are now all about CB and thinking of how to consolidate all the datasources that are being used into one place. We have gather initial inputs and almost finished the current state analysis. Next to come is the real technical part so things are getting more interesting.

Of course we do not forget to have some fun and enjoy Philippines :).

Happy 4th :)

Home office during end of Ramadan

Drone that is capturing images of the rice field.

What a week ... and it feels like I’m here for a month now. I think its because of so many exciting things that have happened this week. We spent weekend in Manila to acclimatise, went to see the IBM Philippines office in Manila and had lunch with country general manager Luis Pineda, moved to Los Banos where we will spend next 4 weeks working for IRRI, kicked-off our projects meeting all the great people from IRRI and SEARCA together with director general Matthew Morell and finally started working on our project.

The project I’m working on with Diana and Kirsten is to help IRRI digitize their Country Briefs - documents that scientists, researchers and management use to prepare for a visit abroad or for hosting an incoming visitor. It can contain info on the country, the collaboration history but also - of course - info on the rice. As like an other organization this information is scattered. It’s our task to find the data and loop it into the country brief. To sum it up: it’s finding the data and the source and than create ‘one stop shop’ where all the data can be found. 

In the first few days we did a great progress, managed to interview few people from IRRI, get closer to understanding of current state in the organisation and think of what deliverables we can deliver in 3 weeks.

I was hoping to blog daily but we have also other important staff to do (like ride a jeepney or climb mountains ) so we help each other and blog every other day. The rest of the team is than more than happy to reblog  :). 

I-view with Jacqueline Hughes  - Deputy Director General (Research)

Team brainstorm

Web team in action

the best team mates Diana and Kirsten fully focused in our office