Day 19: On the right track!
Seeing a familiar European face on the Skytrain this morning didn’t really calm us down a lot.
Like most or our colleagues this week, we were rather nervous this morning, because the weekly review meeting with our host organization was waiting for us. Our chance to show the progress we made in the last 7 days and hear if we’re still working in the right direction. And if we aren’t, what would that mean for the last week we’re here??
One thing was clear for us from Day 1: We did not want to spend 4 weeks with our organization and produce something that would be read and then disappear in some digital drawer never to be pulled out again. Seeing as one of SAP’s CSR focus topics is ‘digital’ in the broadest sense (and we Social Sabbatical ‘SAP consultants’ are often mistaken for the digital technical guys that can ‘fix our ERP system’), it is quite challenging to produce a solution that the host organization can actually test and experience first-hand during our time with them. Four weeks really isn’t a long time.
We also realized early on that we’d be missing a couple of the important elements of a complete design thinking process, but think we did a good job on ideating and some prototyping — the subsequent steps will hopefully happen when we’re back to our regular job and life.
One thing I assumed would happen (even before we traveled to Bangkok), which also doesn’t jive so well with the overall agreement process on the Scope of Work, is that the scope would actually change during the course of the project. In our case, it’s not a completely different scope, but it certainly is a bigger re-focus than we thought at the beginning. In the end, however, it’s just a stronger emphasis on building a central database containing all of Kenan’s beneficiary information rather than on the community engagement aspect of our project objective. Cristina did a great job of explaining the background to the changes since last week.
The overall feedback was positive, so we got right back to amending our final report after the meeting — there’s lots to be done by next Thursday.
I have to admit that I still have a hard time reading the super-friendly Kenan colleagues — is that feedback genuine or only polite? In our small team, we’re at different levels of confidence about that.
Overall, we are hopeful that what we will recommend next week will be useful for the organization if they manage to assign dedicated resources to the activities. That aspect might be difficult for an non-profit organization where most staffing is tied to concrete projects. What we propose are cross-organizational activities that would normally not fall under a dedicated project funded by a donor. We will see.
At the end of the day, we felt that we deserved a little celebration.
