Understanding our client, their challenges and thinking big.
Early Tuesday morning (March 5), my team had our first day at the client. To quickly re-cap from one of my initial blog posts, the National Institute of Technical Teachers Training and Research (NITTTR) was established by the Ministry of Human Resource Development 50+ years ago to improve the quality of technical education in India.
We also learned during the IBM kick-off that NITTTR is a high profile organization and very strategic given its brand and influence in the country. The pressure was on to create an engagement that was going to deliver tangible and impactful outcomes in the next 3 weeks.
Before knowing our team skill-sets or what might be possible, NITTTR asked us to design a curriculum for teachers in the areas of Blockchain and IoT technologies. We knew emerging tech was a priority focus area, but also knew IBM experts within India had been working with them in that capacity.
We were eager to use that first day to engage with the client to understand more about who they were and the challenges they may need help with. By remaining open-minded and asking countless questions to dig deeper, we were lucky enough to find a change agent within the organization and had a quick, impromptu meeting organized with the Director of NITTTR.
That meeting proved invaluable because he empowered us to turn around a new proposal within a few days, one that aligned their needs with our expertise and capabilities. I felt alive being back in a fast-paced, uncertain environment, collaborating with a team in person.
Together we spent the next 24 hours conducting key stakeholder interviews, building relationships with the client and innovating to see what problem we were best positioned to tackle. We talked with professors, masters and PhD students, and start-ups working to get their business off the ground to understand how things work today.
What we found was that in a few short years government institutions like NITTTR would need to become self-sustaining as their funding sources would be shrinking. Coupled with other external factors and today’s fast changing tech industry, the organization requires a contemporary business model, strategy and operational capabilities to shift its operations and training programs. That is where we could leverage our expertise in strategy, ops and entrepreneurship and business.
By the end of the week, we pitched to the Director and a key group of stakeholders about a project focused on designing NITTTR’s new business strategy. Our end goal was ultimately to help NITTTR become more innovative, efficient, and impactful by helping them develop their capacity to serve their community and thus beneficiaries.
We were excited for the challenge and swiftly finalized and signed our statement of work and were ready to get the project underway!
One very large detail I forgot to mention earlier … half way through the week our team grew to 6 as one of the host organizations unfortunately had dropped out of the program. So in addition to completely re-shaping our project, we gained 3 additional IBMers which would add rich new insights to our project!
For the remaining 3 weeks, I would be working with Kerry, a consultant from Washington, DC; Aline, a process improvement expert from Brazil; Dagmar, a client executive from Germany; Doreen, a sales executive from New Jersey; and Joao, a IT architect/project manager from Brazil.
I’m grateful to have 5 other highly talented, diverse IBMers to collaborate with and to learn from, not to mention the 12 other IBMers who are with us on this journey.
