Day 16: It’s time to get more concrete

Looking forward to a — probably — intense week, where we need to really hash out many of the more concrete details that have been swirling around our discussions to date, we spent most of the morning planning our next activities and starting to structure our final report, which will be our major deliverable. We’ve already been given much information, which helps to describe the status quo.

What also helped was an hour-long exchange with Wanpen Outharasawat of Kenan’s Social Inclusion Program, the one program that was missing in our list of key stakeholders. We heard about the amazing WE Inspire project for marginalized women in the remote North of Thailand …

… and how the program organizes itself. Efficiency is a major challenge in projects such as this one, where the beneficiaries happen to partly be cross-border migrants with a shaky legal status in Thailand, the Kenan project managers hardly speak their language and rely largely on local partners, and the beneficiaries often have no access to digital communication channels. It sounds like in such cases a higher degree of digitalization will not be the solution at least in the short term.

A truly interesting afternoon waited for us: A Kenan staff meeting, essentially the fiscal year kick-off, which covered numerous announcements from the official presentation of new colleagues and the farewell to others, through the presentation of new projects across Kenan’s programs (Education, Social Inclusion, and Small Business), to an overview of plans in different teams for 2023.

To my surprise, the key HR team’s slide pretty much covered what we know from our own HR communications: Kenan wants to attract, develop, motivate, and retain employees through a number of measures: Work-life balance, improved resource management, nice office spaces, better recognition practices, training and career development support, and so on.

I guess in that respect it doesn’t really matter whether a company has 50 employees or 110,000 — you’re still dealing with human beings (and all their behaviours), who are members of an organization and its rules. And it seems that the non-profit job market in South East Asia is very much an candidate-driven one, similar to the software industry globally.

Like some of our colleagues in the other projects, in the course of the afternoon our small SAP team at Kenan had to deal with the rather uncomfortable situation where we — as ‘SAP consultants’ — were asked a couple of questions that went rather deep into the technology of a certain industry. None of us have a technical role or the corresponding expertise in our regular job, and it was difficult to not come across as impolite or uncooperative when we worked on changing the topic and promised to find a suitable contact in the local SAP organzation…

It was nice to end the work day with the party part of the staff meeting. It was surprising how much Kenan’s people are into Halloween, but it certainly was fun to be in the middle of it.