Blog #6 — First Week on the Project
The first week on the project was a whirlwind. What surprised me the most was how similar it felt to week one on every other project I’ve started at IBM. We conducted multiple stakeholder interviews, attempted to tease out underlying challenges, learned how to work effectively as a team, and refined our scope of work with key clients as new information surfaced. While the cultural and language barriers certainly presented new challenges, it felt like a fairly typical “discovery week” on a new strategy engagement.
Similar to my experience in previous strategy roles, I spent most of the first week struggling to untangle and understand the current state, while simultaneously identifying how to best support our client during the remainder of the assignment. To simplify an extremely complicated situation, there is a desire by members of the community to build a “Multimodal Park” for logistics, industrial, and transportation activities just outside the city. (For my blog readers who speak Spanish, the project site is posted here.) The vision is for this site to be a centralized transport hub for the region, creating an intersection of commerce routes from Brazil / Uruguay to the East, Northern Argentina / Paraguay to the North, Western Argentina / Chile to the West, and most importantly, from the international port of Buenos Aires to the South.
All of the stakeholders we interviewed were supportive of the project. The local transport companies currently incur costs and deal with significant inefficiencies due to their locations in the city center; they see an opportunity to reduce costs and increase volumes of goods shipped by moving to the new site. Other local businesses, such as hotels and gas stations, have also expressed interest in developing a services area within the park given the potential ROI. The municipality of Santa Fe shares the vision of the city as a transport hub and has its own ongoing initiatives (including building a new port and expanding the airport’s capacity) that complement the project beautifully. Finally, the project would provide stable, gainful employment for the impoverished communities living on the outskirts of the city, and has already drawn both attention to and public funding for their basic needs for housing and electricity.
Since the project seems like a “no brainer” with comprehensive stakeholder support, we spent the week trying to understand why no visible progress has been made since its initial conception six years ago. Throughout the week, we tested many hypothesis regarding the hesitation of individual private investors, political maneuvering during an election year, lack of experience in executing a project of this scale, decentralized ownership, rivalry with the nearby city of Rosario, recent political and economic instability in Argentina, and a general culture of bureaucracy. Realistically, all of these factors and more have contributed to the project’s delay.
Recognizing that we could spend our entire assignment and more trying to truly diagnose the underlying problems, our team spent the second half of week one grappling with how to add the maximum amount of value over the subsequent three weeks. We took stock of not only the challenges faced by our clients, but also the skill sets and knowledge we bring to the table. (As a side note, I found this to be the aspect of the week that differed most dramatically from a typical consulting engagement. I am more accustomed to first defining the problem and proposed solution, then building a team with the requisite skills, not the other way around).
Ultimately, we proposed two deliverables. First, we plan to deliver a comprehensive business plan for the multimodal park, with sections on financial analysis, market analysis, stakeholder analysis, and operational analysis. Our goal for the business plan is both to deliver valuable content and to teach our clients a framework for executing large-scale implementation projects such as the ones IBM delivers for our clients.
Our second deliverable is a proposal, or what we’ve started calling a “value proposition presentation”. While all stakeholder groups understand the project from their own perspective, the available information is dispersed and highly technical. Our goal with the second deliverable is to empower our clients to tell a single, compelling story to all of the project’s stakeholders about the park, its benefits, and why it matters to Santa Fe. Moving the project forward will require investment (financial and otherwise) from all stakeholder groups, but until the short-term and long-term benefits are clearly defined, they lack motivation to take the first step.
I am hoping that after an exhausting and rewarding week one that was full of absorbing new information, that we will have some breathing room during week two to focus on building out our deliverables.
