First week in Brazil

08/05/2015 Friday
Just could not believe it. It is Friday already. Our translator said a couple of times today: TGIF. Haha. Got what it stands for?

What have we done in this first week?
We have gained understanding of the client’s IT environment, challenges they are facing, the way they work, and we have reviewed the SOW document, had information sessions with two stakeholders from special units, and captured processes… and decided our approaches ahead.

Most importantly, we formed good working relationship with the client. We worked together. We had lunch together.  Brazilian people are nice and easy to work with. They are warm, friendly, welcoming, fun, with sense of humor. Our translator said people in Ceara are the happiest people in Brazil. I have no doubt about that.

In the morning at 8:30am, the car from the client waited in front of the hotel to pick us up. After around 30 minutes, we arrived at the client’s office and started our work. During the day, we were served Brazilian coffee, all sorts of juice (mango, pineapple with mint, rock melon…), and sometimes even cake this afternoon.

We had lunch in self-service restaurant new the office.

After lunch, we came back to the office and continued to work.

We normally finished work at around 6pm, and the driver dropped us back to the hotel. It is May here in Brazil, and by this time when we got back to the hotel, it was already dark.

This is our daily routine, quite packed. We are quickly getting adapted to this new environment.

Corporate Social Responsibility

For those who came from developed countries, youngster criminal problem may be something distant. But here in Fortaleza, it is a serious social problem. It is the problem our client is handling.

A special unit from our client manages the centres to accommodate the youngsters who committed crime. By law, the teenagers have not reached mature age to be put into prison. The special unit runs programs and centres to help these teenagers to reconcile and return to the society.

Today people from the special unit came to provide a presentation to us on the operation of the unit.

It was a long presentation of over 2 hours.

The presentation covered the severity of the problems, complexity of how to handle the problems, and the challenges this department is facing. It was actually depressing to learn what happened to those teenagers. And I felt sad for these problem teenagers.

The consultancy my team will provide to the client in this assignment will cover capturing the business processes for the IT system on how the special unit runs to qualify the intake of the teenage offenders and how the centres operate.

As compared with the other teams which are to help green energy organization to produce market plan, or the vocational institution to develop mobile app to keep track of graduated students, our team’s project seems to be more serious and less fun. But I think if our consultancy can eventually help the department to provide IT systems to handle the operations more effectively, it will be very meaningful. And it will fulfill our corporate social responsibility of CSC program.

Translation

Between my two other team members, one speaks fluent Portuguese, and the other could understand around 60%, which is great advantage to our team, considering for some other teams, none of their team members could communicate in Portuguese. But for me, translation is critical, as my Portuguese level was limited to the few words I learned a couple of days before I arrived in Brazil.

The challenge on the first two days was that, on seeing our team’s advantage, the originally assigned translator didn’t turn up in our meetings. One team member ended up acting as translator for me, but she had to understand what the client was talking first, before she could translate to me. She is really good, but for her to take both consulting and translating roles didn’t seem to be how it was supposed to work.

At that point, what came across my mind was how to prevent this challenge we were facing from becoming a future case study (with the training we received in the preparation stage across my mind).

In the debriefing, I raised the issue.  Will see how it will be improved. I need to consider how to get more formal translation.

Our client

Our team’s client is the state department of labor and social development. We received the first draft of SOW document one month ago. For the first two days, the manager of their IT department showed us how their current Information Management System works.

From high level structure to the functions in their web based systems, we had a better understanding of their Information management system. We were actually overwhelmed by the volumes of information.

The second day passed very quickly. “Passar Rapido” is the Portuguese I learned today to say how time flies.

We finished at 6:15pm, and when we got back to the hotel, it was 6:45pm, and it was fully dark.

When we stepped into the hotel, we received message in Whatsapp group from Fernada reminding us to attend team debriefing meeting in 20 minutes (it was sent to us 5 minutes ago). At 7pm, we turned up in the hotel conference room… As Kevin mentioned, “Tenho fome”, we felt hungry.

Get down to business

We were received by the manager of the IT department from the client. After brief introduction, and meeting with the director of this government department (our client is the state department of labor and social development), we headed for lunch. After lunch, we got straight down to business. We were overwhelmed by the volume of information and level of details.

The client was very welcoming, and we were served Brazilian coffee and fruit juice in our meeting. Then we were shown around in the office building, and introduced to the IT department.

At this season (autumn) in Fortaleza, it gets dark early. On the way back to the hotel, we briefly discussed our approach further ahead. When we got back to the hotel, it was nearly 6pm, and we were really exhausted.  This is CSC Brazil 19 STDS team business day1.

Get started!

On Monday, our program was officially kicked off. We gathered in the conference centre of one of the clients. The directors from the clients attended the conference, which was hosted by program executive of IBM Brazil. Our team members sat in the front line, with the representatives from the clients sitting behind us.

It was in the form of round table. The directors each in turn shared their vision from their own perspective. We could now see a bigger picture of our CSC Brazil 19 program. All the 4 clients were chosen carefully, and they are all related to some extent. I gathered that the mission was to improve education, employment, and entrepreneurship in the state of Ceara. There were a lot figures shared in the round table: there are 50 million young people between 15 to 29 years old in Brazil, which comprise 20 percent of the population. But around 9 million of them were not studying. The associated government department partnered with the  NGOs such are vocational education institutions to offer training opportunities to the young people to help them acquire vocational skills and skills to start and run micro-small business.

Following the round table, there were pictures, a lot of pictures, which continued when we went to meet our client in the client’s office. They are obviously very excited on our arrival and participation in the program.

Then we headed to our respective client directly. Our assignment officially got started, and very fast.

Are you ready?

At 2:30pm in the afternoon (Sunday 3rd May. When was last time you had a meeting at work on Sunday afternoon? haha), we had our first group meeting in the hotel conference room, hosted by Fernanda, attended by our 13 team members, plus Fabiana and Juliana.

Fernanda went through our agenda for next week, the important dates in this month, and the things to pay attention to.

Then we had a team buildup exercise: everyone was handed a piece of A3 size paper to draw three pictures to describe three strengths. It was fun! Below was mine. Guess what they are?

Then we went through the SOW document of each team. The team are really good, and really serious about the projects we are assigned to do. Fernanda, Fabiana and Juliana are excellent, as they addressed every question we had and issue we raised.

Tomorrow is the first day. It is going to be a big day. We are looking forward to it.

Go out for a walk in the morning

After breakfast, I went out for a walk along the beach outside the hotel. The average temperature in this city is 27, 28 degrees. Sunny most of the time, with a few shower in early morning, or afternoon. It is Sunday morning. There are people jogging, walking, skateboarding, cycling, swimming. No doubt Brazilians love sports. I think there are few foreign tourists in this city. The beach is beautiful.

This afternoon, we will have our first team meeting in the conference room in the hotel to do team buildup and review SOW documents. Tomorrow we will go to meet the clients.

On the way to group dinner

At 7:30pm on Saturday night, we gathered at the lobby, and headed for dinner in a popular local restaurant.

Outside the hotel, there is a beach. On the band along the beach, the scene was quite different at night. There was the night market. On Friday night when I arrived, there was traffic jam along the road. It seemed it was the place the local people headed to on Saturday night as well. In the night market, people were selling all sorts of things. There were children playing. Then I heard people singing song. When I walked closer I found there was a choir practicing.

It was phenomenal. I have not seen such night market for a long time, having been living in Australia for years, and traveling to Europe a few times. The feeling was it seemed it brought me back to China. It reminded me of the night markets in Xi’an, and Beijing. Rambla Street in Barcelona old town was busy at night, but the feeling was  different, as most people there should be tourists. In here, most people look local.

On the way back to the hotel after dinner, we had a chat, about what we do over the weekend, and shared our views on family values. The girl from China does a lot of volunteer work over the weekend teaching the children English, and taking care of the old people. The colleague from the US takes his son to soccer match and fixes things in his house. I think how we spend our time defines who we are.

An afternoon out to the beach

In the afternoon, we went to a beach called Croco beach. It is Saturday afternoon, and it was crowded there.

We took taxi and I was told taxi was cheap here in Brazil. The condition of the road was not very good. A lot of cracks and uneven surface, and for a few times, the taxi driver needed to drive around those cracks or the the debris of smashed glass.

It took us around 15 minutes to get the the breach. We found a table and sat down. It looked most of the people were local. Kitty and I might look outstanding as we didn’t see any other Asian here. A Brazilian man sitting at the table next to us asked me if I was from Korea. I told him we were working for an International IT company and we were from around the globe, the US, Europe and Australia. He told me he was asking because there was a Korean company doing investment in a local project here.

A lot of local people coming over to us to sell all kinds of things. Some of them were children. This is common in Brazil. I see the purposes of our corporate service program here. We have NGO (Non Governmental Organization) clients in this assignment, and one of them is an IT training organization, and another is a green energy company. We are offering our time for free to them to provide consultancy to help addressing the challenges they are facing. We help them, and in turn they help improving the education, community services provided to the local people. Our CSC program is doing very meaningful things in return to the society in a global context.

For the emerging countries, I think better education is definitely one of the most important ways to help the young generation get out of poverty and have a better future. And another thing is I could see the infrastructure such as road system needs to be improved.

In the afternoon out, we, as a team, got to know each other better as well, and we have fun. So many funny moments. Another theme of our program is about culture awareness or culture adaptability. We are from so many different culture backgrounds and it is looking to be more exciting.