Oct 19, 2016
One last photo with the 10am flight crew leaving Piura - 11 of 15 present :)
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One last photo with the 10am flight crew leaving Piura - 11 of 15 present :)
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It's hard to sum up my feelings in this moment - it's been a tough month away from home, in a small city with a completely foreign culture, a challenging client, with a bunch of strangers that I can now call friends. We only had IBM in common when we started but now we have so much more! I am super grateful for what these interesting and funny individuals have taught me, for the laughs, quirks, patience and company! I'm even more grateful to Piura for welcoming me and helping me appreciate my home, and learn so much more about myself. This isn't quite the end of my adventure in Peru but it does end the IBM CSC experience. I hope the next leg shares more about Peru but complements the work I've been doing here the last month! Lima, I'm on my way back...
My IBM Corporate Service Corp experience is now over and I'll always remember it. I developed some close friendships. So proud of how people from 10 different countries worked together to improve quality of technology for others. #ibmcsc #cscperu5 (at Piura, Peru)
Our solutions have finally come together and we are frantically getting ready to present to our client! We had a couple of late nights early in the week creating our beloved powerpoint slides and gather some last minute data to finalise our stats… death by analysis…
In a nutshell, it was super hard to just go all in with a digital system to overthrow the current paper based forms for the health department. We had to be so mindful of the limitations on budget for PCs and access to internet in remote areas. We did though suggest some cost effective ways that they could get internet in more centres, and what an online and offline electronic system might look like. Offline would allow remote locations to still populate information on a digital system, but then export it to a usb and physically deliver to their nearest online location as they normally would with the physical forms. This would still eliminate some of the errors that come from poor handwriting. What was more valuable in my personal opinion was the small process changes we recommended they implement on the current paper system that will make their lives easier starting today. This included creating some incentives for patients to return their forms if they e.g. leave with them to get medicine from the pharmacy… we suggested they collect their ID cards as collateral. We also provided some filing suggestions and the initiation of a change committee to help create empathy for each stakeholder, which would be a forum to share ideas for process improvement.
Our recommendations were super well received! Not without the chaos that is any Peruvian meeting though, which I felt all happened in my section of the presentation by the way! We had people walking in late, taking phone calls, then the coffee man walk in with 2 coffees to then realise there were 11 of us in the room triggering another 3 trips in and out. These were complemented with everyone munching on chifles of course, which are Peruvian banana crisps served with everything, which then triggered side conversations in Spanish that I lost control of! I was dizzy and super overwhelmed by the end of it, but I think our point was made, and they were all so excited to take our feedback forward for implementation. We had three levels of management in one room, and it was clear by their conversation that they rarely got together – hopefully this triggers a more frequent channel of communication, which we recommended as being key to success!
A few Peruvian connections through the CSC program manager lead us to this gorgeous beach side house in Los Organos, about 2.5 hours from Piura, just south of the well-known party town of Mancorra. As intriguing as Mancorra was to all of us, we had the same agenda of a relaxing weekend with freedom to eat or sleep whenever, swim whenever, and sip a pisco sour watching the sunset… we’re getting old! Some of the group headed out for a whale watching expedition on Saturday morning, but 3 hours on a boat is not quite my idea of fun! The rest of us slept in, enjoyed a (slightly romantic) walk along the beach and some time to read and listen to music.
One of our team bonding pass-times has been the German card game of Toros, named after the Taurus bull I suspect, which I started off quite well at… my performance quickly deteriorated on this trip away though! The bunch of nerds that we are, we had the spreadsheet happening with our average scores regularly monitored. Our chef extraordinaire Mohit, my fellow Sydney sider, then cooked us up a storm of chicken biryani from his native India for dinner, which was topped off by some home-made pisco sours using a pump water bottle to shake the egg whites. Yum!
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Inspiration is the word to explain these kids, and it’s exactly what I expected to experience. We were lucky enough today to take some time away from our project and visit a local school for high performing students that has only been around for 2 years. They select the top student from each school in the region who then sits an entrance exam to be selected for a scholarship to study and board at the school. Most students, aged 14-16, are from the poorest areas of the region, ranging from Piuran towns to the Amazon – some of them who can’t go home on the weekends or holidays as it can take them up to 4 days to travel back to their home towns. Most of them have not left Piura, so you can imagine their fascination with the places we’ve visited and people we have met in our lifetimes. How privileged are we to be in this position?!
We split into small groups, and for the first time in Peru I haven’t needed a translator to communicate. These kids are absolute guns at English! I felt like my true feelings were able to be shared, through a mix of Spanish and English and teaching each other words and sharing our future aspirations. They are all aspiring to be engineers, business managers, architects, and teachers. What was sad is they know they have to leave Piura, or even Peru, to get opportunities and fulfil their dreams. We ended the day with at least 50 friend requests on facebook, which I don’t have the heart to ignore but realistically can’t accept. I have these photos to savour to memory of these kids though – I know they will find their way, and maybe I will see some of them in Sydney one day!
Enacting Change in an Organization
This is a followup to my previous post about why change is difficult. Here are some key steps to take to improve chances of success when enacting change in an organization:
Obtain Buy In and Support from Leadership
Process Champions
Find forward thinkers who will serve as champions of the change, touting the advantages and promoting change.
Early Messaging
Let everyone know early that change is coming so they can anticipate change.
Gather Examples of Successful Changes from the Past
Discuss why people were resistant to change
Why did people eventually make the change?
Discuss the Pros and Cons of the New Approach versus the Old Approach
Education Sessions
Demonstrate the changes. If the change involves software, let people use the software hands on. Allow people to ask questions and address their concerns.
Follow up training after deployment to address appropriate usage.
Establish Metrics to Measure Improvement
So… back to the project front after a packed out weekend. Just when we thought we had heaps of time, we’re less than 2 weeks to go and need to draw a serious line in the sand on information gathering. We are so deep in the chaos of the patient record system that we are confusing ourselves. My teammates Jonathan and Vish started the week at one last field trip to a rural medical facility whilst I prepared a presentation for a spontaneously requested status update meeting with some members of the Health Dept. The line has been drawn, and we agree this week is dedicated to narrowing down the issues we want to address, and the associated solutions that seem most feasible to recommend.
Sporadic is probably a good word to describe Peruvians – your food takes anywhere from 5 minutes to an hour to arrive, people may or may not show up to a meeting, punctuality is not really a thing, unless you’re a taxi driver…side note since I mentioned them is that there is a serious oversupply of taxis rumoured to be fuelled by a tax on their vehicle that they can avoid if it is being used for work purposes! They beep at you continuously as they drive past hoping you might be struggling to walk and desperate for a taxi. Sigh. So really there isn’t much of a system for anything, and in terms of wrapping up our project, the hardest part is key stakeholders disappearing without notice and the lack of communication to us, and amongst themselves. Ding ding ding! We had a few epic light bulb moments for our solution including communication and information sharing tools…their expectations are technology though, so we will just have to meet them half way!