Day 12: New experiences — desired and not…
On Thursday, we were very much looking forward to returning to the Kenan offices. We had several meetings with project managers scheduled and were looking forward to getting deeper insights from the people actually running the projects. We had so far had few meetings with those we are supposed to support.
Titirat Suratin from the Education Program walked us through a typical project process with the focus on communicating with the beneficiaries (i.e. the course participants). Essentially, communication before, during, and after training happens through LINE, the main chat app in South East Asia. The idea of building a community for beneficiaries, in Titirat’s case usually school and community college teachers, is viewed with some skepticism — teachers tend to be busy with their regular job.
Chunlawit Chianpatanaruk, a project manager from the Small Business team, deals with a very different — and often very un-digital — target audience. What does that mean? Quite often, it is not even possible to use digital forms for data collection (such as registration or post-training feedback). Needless to say, this doesn’t help when you discuss to further digitalize Kenan’s processes. Likewise, we heard about the locally optimized processes, such as storing working files on a laptop rather than one of the 2 available office cloud solutions, using a variety of tools for forms creation (based on personal preferences), and the lack of a central data repository.
All these discussions made us wonder whether our Scope of Work should be re-focused. The lack of a harmonized way of collecting beneficiary-related data and of a central data pool that can be used for numerous purposes is emerging as the biggest obstacle to improving Kenan’s way of working — and that seems to be less of a technology question and more one of process and human behaviour. And why would Kenan be different from any other organization in that respect?
Lunch was a very new experience — in the parking lot behind our office building on level 3. Here we were, choosing our food from half a dozen booths around a central seating area next to the motorcycle parking section — with cars driving essentially right by the tables. The food here is so delicious and so reasonable — I’ll miss this a lot when we leave.
And talking about food and (actually undesired) experiences: One should never take on silly challenges. At the same time, we’re also here to have fun after work. So, here we went and tried some unusual local delicacies…
