At the beginning of the assignment, many of us exchanged a token gift that represented our country — initial post here. Over the past 2 week, more teammates brought forth their cultural gifts and it was one of my favorite parts of this adventure.  It was wonderful to learn about new countries, new cities, new religions, new customs, etc.

From top to bottom –
Wouter from Belgium … what else would you expect, but chocolate!  He shared many varieties after dinner one night and then I went back for a full bar.  What can I say, I have a sweet tooth.

Chandra from Australia (but Sri Lankan) … stuffed kangaroo for me and stuffed koalas for the kiddos.  How sweet of him to think of our families.

Paola from Costa Rica … a beautiful handmade ornament / key chain in Costa Rica colors to signify family and that they are always close to the heart.  To make it even more meaningful, her mother made these for us.

Muriuki (our NGO lead) from Kenya … a traditional Kenyan friendship bracelet in the countries colors

Sanjay from India and Valentina from the US (and Austria and Bosnia Herzegovina – she’s truly global) … they took a unique approach and didn’t provide something from their own culture, but something from the culture we were immersed in.  Tshirts and hats from North West University in Mafikeng where we stayed for 3+ weeks.  What a great idea!

#IBMCSC

On Thursday, we presented our final recommendations to the client, iNeSI, on various aspects of e-Skilling South Africa.  The presentation went very well and the team did it’s best to cover so much ground in 2 hours … I think we ended up with 7 main areas to talk about and 85 charts.  Kudos to the audience for paying attention so long and asking insightful questions at the end.  There were 20 or so stakeholders in attendance for the final presentation — from iNeSI, government, Universities and even other corporations with Microsoft and Cisco in attendance.  e-Skilling South Africa is a hot topic so we are hopeful and confident that we made a positive impact on the country.

And even though we still had to put the final touches on the written report for Friday, we made time to have a short celebratory dinner in Rosebank with one of the best meals (and sangria) we’d had thus far, just falling short of the eland filet at Tau Game Lodge and the final dinner at Moyo.

Effie

Wouter

On Friday, the usual suspects rounded up at 7:30 am (a late start for us!) for our final T25 session.  It was a great way to start our final morning and we even had a new participant for our last day — Sanjay!  After that, the two main clients came to our hotel to debrief on the presentation from the day before and we learned that our project will continue for a few more months with additional presentations to stakeholders and their Board of Directors.  I guess we did something right 🙂  From there, we were off to IBM Johannesburg, where we had started 4 weeks ago.  We met with employees to tell them about our CSC experience and then briefed senior leaders on our project and how IBM can continue the conversation after our departure.

Our final stop as a team was one last dinner.  It was a wonderful place — Moyo — claiming to deliver a “sophisticated African experience” and it did it well.  It was set around a lake with lots of outdoor patios and fires going since it is chilly here.  The food was spectacular again — slightly edging out the pizza from above.  Some had ox tail, others ostrich and may had a stuffed fillet.  Dinner started with a traditional hand washing ceremony and there was an artist available to paint your face with an African symbol from one of the local tribes.  We all had a lot of fun with that. It was a perfect send off from our #ibmCSC experience.

Today we all went separate ways … 4 folks went home (Sanjay, Chandra, Lucia and Wouter) … 1 stayed in Joburg (Suro) … 8 went to Cape Town (Julie, Valentina, Effie, Aruna, Paola, Tarik, Leigh and Savi) … and I’m sitting at the Joburg airport waiting on Dave to land.  He’ll be here in less than an hour and I cannot wait.  Our personal adventure starts tomorrow with a flight to Kruger National Park and a safari for 3 days.  Stay tuned ….

This was a week of final ‘everythings’ …. final day in Mafikeng, final dinner with the North West staff and final long bus ride.  We also had final presentation to the client, final presentation to IBM, final day in Johannesburg, final team T25 workout, final dinner, and on and on, but I’ll focus on just a few items in this post.

Our final dinner in Mafikeng was back at the Hotel School (the school for training tourism majors where we had eaten a few times before).  We treated our DOT representatives, North West University leaders, and North West University students to dinner to thank them for welcoming us to their province.  Valentina gifted us all NWU t-shirts so we all wore them to show appreciation for the place that was our work office for three weeks.   We passed out gifts and gave final farewells to those we wouldn’t see again.

The IBM Team showing NWU pride

Team 3 — Effie, Chandra, me and our Master student Kebiditswe

The bus ride from Mafikeng to Johannesburg went near the Cradle of Humankind and we decided a few weeks back that we would stop there.  It was something I had never heard of prior to arriving here, but was such a worthwhile visit.  According to Wikipedia, the Cradle of Humankind is a World Heritage Site about an hour northwest of Johannesburg in the Gauteng province. The name Cradle of Humankind reflects the fact that the site has produced a large number, as well as some of the oldest, hominin fossils ever found, some dating back as far as 3.5 million years ago. The cradle is a large area and we specifically we stopped at Sterkfontein cave, which has produced more than a third of early hominid fossils ever found prior to 2010.

We took a tour of the limestone caves and then enjoyed lunch outside before continuing on the Johannesburg. #ibmcsc

Cave tour selfie! Leigh, Paola, Julie, me and Aruna

Today is our last day of the #IBMCSC assignment in South Africa.  I can hardly believe it’s been one full month since we first arrived in South Africa!

We are debriefing this morning with our client, iNeSI, to review yesterday’s presentation and then we head to the IBM Johannesburg office in the afternoon to present to senior leaders and meet with employees to get them interested in applying for the CSC next year.  I am beyond grateful for this experience and especially for the people I’ve worked and lived with for the last month. They are each amazing and talented in their own way.  There is no way to really thank them enough for how they’ve impacted my life through personal and professional growth, but they know they’ll be carried with me on my journey through life.

Below are their portraits — some multiple of each person because they were just such great pictures.  They were captured by our team photographer, Wouter (well, he’s really a very smart IT architect but perhaps he should switch careers?)  Hover over to see their names.

Aruna

Aruna

Chandra

Chandra

Effie

Effie

Julie

Katy

Katy

Leigh

Leigh

Lucia

Lucia

Paola

Paola

Paola

Sanjay

Sanjay

Savi

Savi

Suro

Tarik

Tarik

Valentina

Wouter

Wouter

IBM Joburg – Sydney

DOT lead – Muriuki

Professor Maaga

DOT manager – John

NWU Student Assistant – Kebiditswe

NWU Student assistant – Thapi

NWU Bus Driver – Daniel

NWU Rector

Client – Mymoena Sharif

Client – Dr. Harold Wesso

Sanjay, Paola, Tarik and Aruna

Creating the flow of a single ‘story’ from our four separate projects

We have 3 hours until our final client presentation with iNeSI begins and we are still hovered over laptops.  We have been working as four separate projects supporting the same client this entire time and we now need to weave a single story and give a single presentation on all of our findings.  So most of last night and this morning has looked like this … AKA, the reality of the #IBMCSC program.  One more dry run, then off to get dressed up and on the bus over to the client’s office to deliver our recommendations on furthering the e-Skills agenda in South Africa.

It has been said to us a few times since arriving that South Africa has no middle class. As we took the multiple hour journey from Mafikeng to Johannesburg today, it was quite evident.  We drove through shack town after shack town, dotted by the occasional small town or mine in the distance, only to arrive in the very nice Rosebank area of Johannesburg with ‘welcome drinks’ waiting at the hotel.

Slideshow is from the pics snapped while on the bus today

Mine in the distance

We have returned from rural Mafikeng to urban Joburg for our final #IBMCSC presentations to the client and IBM Thursday and Friday.

Today, Tuesday July 8th, is our last day in Mafikeng.  Tomorrow we will journey back to Johannesburg to finish out the week and our final days on the project.  We have a Thank You dinner planned for this evening at a restaurant, so last night was our final night eating at the hotel. In clearing out my hotel bill, I saw that I had eaten dinner 14 times at their restaurant out of a total of 23 nights spent at the hotel. We are pretty familiar with the place and they are pretty familiar with us.  Surprisingly, however, there were still items on the menu I hadn’t ordered yet and for my final night, I went with the team’s overwhelming recommendation to have the Ox Tail.  It’s not something I would pick normally, but my teammates had been raving about it for 3 weeks, so I had to give it a shot.  They were right — it was more like beef stew, albeit with bones — and it was absolutely wonderful and served in a cute pot!

Final dinner at the hotel – Ox Tail – complete with my red camping cup that got a lot of use

And while our time at the Mmabatho Palms has been interesting to say the least, it did leave us with a wonderful sight on our final departure to the University.  It was the coldest day we’ve had so far with a low of 28F/-2C and so the trees out front of the hotel that are sprayed by the fountains had frozen and formed icicles.

Icicles – A sight I never thought I’d see in Africa.

And peeking out was a rainbow — such a nice sight as we pulled out.

#IBMCSC

Happy 4th of July to all my American readers!  I hope you are having a great day of cookouts, swimming, sparklers and fireworks.  And although it’s the 4th of July here in South Africa, it’s just an ordinary Friday.  We are at the University working, typing away on our laptops making charts and writing reports.  But we took a quick break just before lunch for the 5 Americans on the team to show a little love for the good ole’ U S of A.

We didn’t think ahead to pack sparklers or flags, but we made do with the materials we could scrounge up — paper and markers.  Kudos to Julie for having the forethought to bring a red-white-n-blue shirt on the trip.  I tried to pass off my blue necklace as patriotic 🙂

Julie (Minnesota), Tarik (North Carolina), Aruna (Texas), Me (Ohio) and Valentina (New York)

#ibmCSC

Not a catchy title, huh?  I was stumped on this post as it’s been three solid days of roll-up-your-sleeves work where we are bypassing heading out for lunch to have more time to arrange conference call interviews, brainstorm, and make charts.  Even the evenings have been low-key with more work and less socializing. We start turning in final deliverables in just 5 days with final presentations a week from today.  Yikes!

Team 2 — Wouter, Savi, Sanjay and Valentina — had an important workshop on Wednesday to bring together provincial government and University reps to determine the theme of the new CoLab that will be installed here at North West University in Mafikeng.  A CoLab is short for “Collaborative Laboratory” that is like a Center of Excellence.

In non-work news, we had a good laugh on our fashion the past few days. Paola and I made the unfortunate mistake of showing up in the most clashing patterns and colors on quite busy dresses on Tuesday.  We were called airline hostesses.  Without conferring with each other, we both decided that we needed to tone it down for Wednesday and ended up in identical, very boring, very plain, black-n-white outfits on Wednesday.  I guess Aruna was clued into the crazy clashing on Tuesday as she showed up in black-n-white, too. It’s back to crazy patterns and colors for tomorrow 🙂  #IBMCSC

Crazy colors

Boring Black-n-White

Our on-the-ground work with the iNeSI (Ikamva National eSkills Institute) was officially at the half-way mark on Friday after completing 2 weeks.  So on Monday June 29, the start of Week 3, our subteam presented a Mid Term Review to our two key stakeholders, Mymoena and Dr. Wesso.

Our #IBMCSC project has been unique in that all 4 subteams are serving the same client, where usually there are separate clients for each team to work with.  This means all 4 sub-teams need to stay closely aligned and need to ‘share’ the client’s time.

We are also physically separated from the clients — with the IBM team in Mafikeng, Mymoena a few hours away in Pretoria and Dr. Wesso even further away in Cape Town.  They were with us for the initial kickoff and we’ve been relying on Skype and email since.  Effie, Chandra and I presented our Mid Term assessment via Skype on what we’ve done, what is planned for this coming week, and what we will deliver in the end.  Our specific project is to create a way to capture and report how South Africa is doing against becoming an e-Literate society.  It requires coordination across the 9 provinces, local and national governmental offices, and many others to provide the necessary data to create a single dashboard. 

The phone session went well and we feel good about our direction for the next week.  Back to another week of reading documents, brainstorming, analyzing and getting our thoughts on paper to be prepared to make a final presentation during Week 4.

Team 3 – Katy, Chandra and Effie