Whirlwind Week

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November 12th 2010

Published: November 21st 2010

It's already been a week since my last post and there is a lot to reflect on, so I've divided the following by section:

ADP Team:
I was able to finally meet my manager, Debbie. She's an amazing person with such an interesting background: with a mix of Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Indonesian, she was born and raised in SF and started with Accenture with a few international projects in UK and France, and then moved to Japan two years ago to improve her Japanese. It was very inspiring to hear about all her international experiences. Before starting this project, one of my biggest concerns was who my manager would be and how we'd get along (as we are only a two-person project), but from the moment I met her, I knew it wasn't going to be a concern. People have already been addressing us as a unit, "Penny & Debbie" or "Debbie & Penny". Confusion has definitely set in, which often happens when I work with another Asian girl. Might as well call us "Denny".

Client:
Our client is Save the Children, one of the leading international organisations in helping children in need. They have 28 national programmes around the world and we are working with Save the Children UK, one of the largest offices within that alliance, which explains my initial trip to London. This year, they've implemented a programme called "Children on the Move", focused on helping and improving the lives of children ages 14-24 who are on the move (e.g. migrants, trafficked children, etc). One of the initiatives within this programme is to provide vocational and life skills training in Musina, South Africa and Shanghai, China - which is why we'll be travelling to those places on our project as well.

Our role:
Debbie and I are here on a 10-wk long project to take in Save the Children's (or "Save" for short) feedback on their objectives of the programme and build a Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) framework. In short, this means figuring out what their success indicators are so they can use that to measure how well their programs are doing. In corporate terms, measuring their ROI.

Work:
This last week was spent at the Save the Children UK headquarters, a 10 minute walk from our hotel. A large part of our days were focused on meeting with various people within the organization and gaining their perspective of the "Children on the Move" project. This is our first brush with the development sector and NGOs, so we have a lot to learn. So far our contacts, Sarah and Victoria, were extremely welcoming and helpful. In fact, I've never felt so welcomed in my career in consulting!

The culture is so different from the corporate sectors I've worked in:

First, they are very heavily paper-based. So far, we've received about 5 pounds worth of documents to read!
Powerpoint is also something still pretty foreign to them - they mostly use Word for proposals and documentation. Recently though, as they've had more and more partnerships with consultants, they are starting to warm up to using Powerpoints.
They are also not as technology-oriented as Accenture is: no laptops, no desktop sharing technology (e.g. Office Communicator). I remember one conference call, while the clients, Debbie, and I were waiting for the country team to come on, both Debbie and I had our laptops open and were typing away as we normally would while waiting. But I noticed that the clients were just sitting there with their notebooks open and feeling a little awkward, so I quickly addressed the situation and apologized. From then on, only one person brought their laptop while the other used pen & paper.
What really amazed me was the office culture and the people: each floor was painted in bright colors and there were so many people sitting next to each other working together, talking, and laughing -- it just felt so alive and abuzz with excitement!
I'd mentioned before that our contacts were extremely helpful, but it didn't stop with them. The entire office had heart: everyone we met was so gracious and genuine and helpful, especially on the little things like offering us tea, going out of their way to open doors for us because we had our arms full with laptops, documents, etc. The facilities manager even offered us softer chairs while we worked in the basement while sitting on their normal plastic chairs. The hospitality just amazed me - where else have you seen this level of generosity before? I think it really speaks to the work that these people are doing and the industry they're working in.

Travel:
Lastly, we've finally nailed down our itinerary for the next 9 weeks, which was a big relief considering all the flying we were to do. The following is our upcoming itinerary:

11/17 - 11/24: Pretoria, South Africa
11/25 - 11/30: Musina, South Africa
12/1 - 12/3: Pretoria, South Africa
12/4 - 12/21: Shanghai, China
12/22 - 1/1: HOME
1/2 - 1/14: Shanghai, China
1/15 - 1/21: London, UK

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