We have a team of 6 IBMers working on this client project. That's half of our larger group. Usually the projects are assigned 2-3 persons, however our client has requested two specific deliverables which required a larger team to be formed. Having a larger team poses some challenges (coordination and alignment of scopes, assignment and tracking of tasks and consensus on deliverables). Joanne is a project manager and is skilled at driving clarification to some of our more ambiguous discussions. I’m sure she feels as though she’s herding cats some days. But we’re managing amazingly well given that our 6 team members are from 5 different countries (see list below), all have different roles within IBM and we’re a mixture of ages and stages in our lives. But we’ve become friends and have quickly learned in the course of a week the strengths of each team member in a way that maximizes our productivity.
If I was to characterize each person on our team I would describe them as follows but mind you we openly talked about the cultural stereotypes one day and quickly made the assessment that none of us actually fits into any of the molds.
- June is from China and is very precise and organized. June has been assigned the team accountant role (divides our dinner bills amongst the team as she’s the only one with a calculator with her) and is also our team photographer. You’ll see many of her pictures posted on facebook and her blog.
- Kerstin is from Germany and is the quiet and undoubtedly the most polite on our team. She is great at defining and documenting processes and has great technical knowledge too as her background is in IT project management. Kerstin and I seem to agree on almost everything and we think a lot alike.
- Ranga is from India, operates at a constant speed of 120 kms per hour and hasn’t always got his filter on (right Ranga :-)) but he definitely provides a lot of comic relief for the team and has excellent technical knowledge.
- Denis is from Brazil and he is the strong silent type. Denis is very focused on what ever task he’s working on (lately it’s been incident and asset tracking tools analysis), he’s methodical in his approach to everything and is always reasonable. His technical knowledge is also very good.
- Joanne is from Canada and is our unofficial shepherd. She’s very process driven and has a current status of all work activities at any given point of time. She keeps us on track....yes, even Ranga.
Today we received our kaba and slits (tops and skirts) from the seamstress who managed to pull together 4 sets for Joanne, Kerstin, June and myself in less than a week. At a cost of 30 cedi ($20) plus fabric, it was great value. The dresses are lovely and we’re planning to wear them to the office and to lunch tomorrow at Flair. Friday is traditional dress day in Ghana. Picture below of Watson's Angels.
The process of buying the dresses was quite fun and Joanne documented it well in her blog but I’ll try to summarize. We first visited Wooden which is a fabric shop. The fabrics come pre-cut in 4 meter lengths which is just enough for a kaba and slit. Once you pick your fabric, the seamstress measures you and you pick the dress style from a set of posters that display the front and back of various styles. The guys at the office got quite a kick out of watching the whole process (we didn’t allow them in the room for the measurement taking however). I had narrowed my dress style down to 2 styles and Denis leaned over my shoulder and picked the one he liked best, I trust his tastes and he was right, my dress turned out lovely. Denis also purchased a shirt in a bright purple geometric pattern. The guys shirts here are quite colourful (like our version of the Hawaiian shirt).
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