Asado, The Musical Bus, The Maradona moment and lot more

Today is the sixth day after I landed back in Bangalore & I am still trying to get into my normal routine after such an eventful month in Buenos Aires. Every night I am having dreams like I am into a school with Fariba and Mo, all of us having dinner together & working on presentations etc. I have talked about the assignment in my posts, but Social Sabbatical was much more than that & I realized that I need to describe that experience as well.

As I am thinking back about the last month, it feels that I have been part of a sports league where 12 of us from different countries are playing together with the aim to win the championship. The reason being we were all staying in the same hotel, used to meet each other almost everyday, share stories, create videos & lot more. We went out together for sight seeing during weekends, played soccer one day and also drove to Carolina's house for asado in a musical bus.

During the first day, when we were at SAP office meeting the clients, Koert mentioned  that we could play soccer as we were in Argentina. 'Where there is a will, there is a way' and there we were playing soccer in the battle of social enterprises on April 21st at City Stadium. Most of us were either first timers or playing after ages.I myself was playing after almost 18 years. There were matches between the four NGOs & finally a match between SAP & all NGOs together. Our team JA didn't have great outing as we conceded few goals, but we were the most diverse & enthusiastic teams and won many hearts . In the final match we were playing for SAP against the solid Argentinian line up from all four clients. Somehow I managed to score the equalizing goal for my team in this game & I was on seventh heaven and  took off my shirt off in celebration. That was my Maradona moment. We went to Piola for drinks & dinner afterwards and had one of the most amazing evenings of the month.

Just couple of days after the soccer, we were excited again to go for Asado to Carolina's place. Asado is term used for barbecue techniques & social event of having  barbecue in Argentina. We had a mini bus booked & we had Rob the rock-star with his guitar. It was an amazing journey with great singers like Rob & Paul stealing the show. We reached Carolina's house which was as beautiful as her & her family, who greeted us with a warm welcome to the magnificent asado place. We enjoyed the delicacies with the wine & even  a non beef eater like me loved this experience as Carolina had ensured there were veggies available.

Argentinian Mate

Again aftersome casual talks we had a musical afternoon courtesy Rob, Paul and Juan. And then we celebrated Mo's birthday which continued throughout the week. We ended it with a round of Mate, the traditional Argentinian drink made by a an infusion of dried leaves of yerba mate (llex paraguaiensis). There are numerous other stories with the amazing team we had & memories are definitely not going to fade soon and I hope to meet everyone sometime or other in future.

The Final Week

Contended I feel as we completed  our final presentation individually to clients yesterday as well as together through a panel discussion at SAP Argentina today. It was amazing to see the outstanding results the four teams have produced in a short span of time. All the organizations were very happy and excited with have been achieved together during last four weeks. Even more heartening was to see the bonding which was very clearly being seen among the teams and their clients & that how together they have worked to achieve their respective goals.

Coming back to JA, we had proposed them & their board the journey of a student in current times & also a visualization of how it could be in future. The future students will have access to content which is much more catchy & attractive. The long texts on the textbook could be replaced by comic strips, exercises by games,videos etc & reflections through tweets, whatsapp or any other technology which all could be combined in a mobile app. We suggested two models of the program, one is the basic one, where digital content could be downloaded by the teachers from JA website & they can independently run the program, This should help the students in areas which are difficult to reach for JA as there is travel cost included along with many other costs. The other model called 'Engage' will replace current training material through a more engaging mobile based solution, where volunteer would be trained by JA & he will conduct the class using web based surveys, videos, interactive games etc. The proposal we gave is not a one shot digitization plan where everything is replaced by an mobile app, but a step by step approach to achieve this. We suggested to do a pilot on the program 'Advantages of staying in a school' which we deconstructed & then based on the results move with entire curriculum. For pilot program also,first step is just to reinvent the program in terms of its structure, for eg, this program is currently for five weeks, which makes volunteer commitment difficult, also make students forget things & need to bring them to the mindset every week. This could be replaced by a one week workshop program. Second step is to modularize and the content & replace certain section with mobile tools. For eg, surveys for pre and  post test, videos or tweets for reflections part of the program, online quizes etc. There will be enough feedback after these two steps & which will actually set the base of future JA mobile app.

During the final  presentation, this proposal was made to JA Argentina. The meeting was also attended by José Caceres, Director for CSR for Americas. The most exciting moment for me was when Felicitas (Education Director, JA Argentina) told that we have showed them the cure for cancer, while she was going through our proposals and also mentioned that she would start the execution for the first stage really soon.  To summarize my experience, I could just say that I am amazed & completely mesmerized by the energy, which JA Argentina team has. I have no doubts that they are definitely going to take this organization to next level & impact many more lives from the youth of this beautiful country.

Meeting with JA Board

After an exciting week 2, some of us went to this beautiful place Iguazu over the weekend & admired this natural wonder. The mighty waterfall called 'The Devil's Throat' left me completely mesmerized & wonder how creative god has been while designing this beautiful nature.

On my flight back to Buenos Aires on Sunday evening I was trying to recollect the ideas we came across while talking to former students & volunteers again w.r.t the program we were deconstructing & trying to rebuild not in terms of content, but overall structure & methodology. Following the design thinking approach we had built the personas of all the stakeholders & identified their characteristics based on the interviews we had done. Idea was to create a visualization of the journey of a student, volunteer & other stakeholders associated with the JA program. The good thing with our team is that we have a ux designer (Fariba) & she always thinks end user. She helped to put all the information which we had gathered to put it very efficiently through new story creating tools.

Monday we had the regular sync up call with people from strategic unit of JA board & we showed them the raw information we had developed so far & also the ideas we have received from students, volunteers etc. We presented the very basic rough proposal as well to them & the response was very positive. Based on all these discussions we prepared our proposal on how the program 'Advantages of staying in a school' should look like in future. The idea was to address two main challenges. How can we help JA update and distribute training material more easily and cost effectively so it is always in-line with student needs and their evolution and how can we make JA Argentina the best and in demand again by reaching the goal of 100,000 students per year by 2020.

One of the most important findings from all our research so far has been that we can't feed the same old content to students in the same way as it has been happening over the years. It is really important to keep them engaged throughout the classes of the program. If there is a long text in the course material, it turns the students down & they are no longer interested in it. There has to be better ways of engaging them so that they understand the value of this course in true sense. Since these courses teach them life building skills and are directly related to their day today environment & things they see, it would be good if the same content could be provided through stories, may be comic strips, videos, online interactions etc. I personally believe that this will be a major turning point if we are able to materialize this. From my experience in professional & personal life, I have myself experienced what wonders can technology do to kids if utilized in the right way and  I also remember the positive response we received in my SAP team when we started 'Did You Know' series for quality to replace lengthy mails to provide important information by a short comic strip to developers across our product unit. The response from colleagues was very positive from different locations like China, Germany etc. So, when its difficult to keep the adults engaged through long mails and monotonous information, we can understand how it would be with the kids. Based on all these facts & research we created a two approached solution or strategy which could be applied to this program on a pilot basis & based on the results, JA should adapt to it.

We presented our findings, approach, ideas & solution strategy to Junior Achievement Board which comprises of leaders from 22 different companies during their bimonthly meeting and & their response was very very positive. They provided some very important view points as well, which we would be integrating with our approach. I would talk about the details in my next post as we head to our final week & will be presenting our final proposal to the clients.

Half Way Through

Two weeks have just passed in a flash even though it seems that weather of this beautiful city has been hostile to me as I am coughing & sneezing almost every day. But the spirits are not dampened as my team is working with these amazingly passionate people from this organization called Junior Achievement Argentina.
 Junior Achievement Argentina (JA Argentina) is an international organization whose aim is to inspire and prepare young people between the ages of 5 and 25 for the working world. This objective is achieved through the implementation of educational programs within three strategic areas: entrepreneurship, financial education and vocational skills. Junior Achievement’s Argentinian branch was founded in 1991 by Eduardo Marty, who first encountered the organization while studying in the US.

JA Argentina runs several programs in different schools which are aimed at teaching students the value of education, decision making, personal & professional development, understanding their strengths, interests, personal cost of dropping out of school, entrepreneurship, managing finances etc .

As we started interacting with Matias, Felicitas & other staff of JA Argentina to understand how they work, I realized how this organization is being run by the raw passion of these people. With just a staff of 12, they are doing exceptional stuff. Just in the last year they delivered their programs to 35000 students & aim to reach 100,000 students per year by 2020. The main challenge they face today is to reinvent themselves in these times & make their programs up to date as per the needs of today, leveraging the need of technology wherever possible. To go deeper on understanding the problem, we took one program called “Advantages of staying in school” and analyzed it thoroughly. We went through the volunteer & student user manuals, talked to students, volunteers, teachers who have been associated with this program during last year. Each of these activities has been really inspiring & enriching to me.The ex students we talked to were very smart & provided great insights to how the programs were being viewed by them, what could have been better & what were the main highlights. Similarly volunteers gave us the different perspective of the program & also mentioned about many challenging situations they faced while executing programs in certain neighborhoods & some times they need to deviate from the manuals & execute course differently keeping in view the background & understanding of the students involved in the program as one shoe doesn't fit all.

Most interesting part was the  valuable information from our end users, the students when we visited one of the schools as they told us what they liked about the program & how they would like to see it future. One of the students highlighted that having an exercise across two pages, where they have to turn pages a number of times back & forth is definitely not good & would be better if an exercise runs through left & right page of the open workbook. This definitely gave me a new perspective of usability issues faced by end users in the IT world as well.
One of the interesting thing I found was almost every student has a smartphone with him/her & would like to use it for games etc instead of having the traditional medium of education. Also it was heartening to know from the school that 90% of the students who have attended JA programs during the last four years have joined university , which itself talks about the impact JA is having.We will be continuing this week on it & will definitely have even more interesting stuff to share next week,

SAP Social Sabbatical : The Journey Begins

‘Excited’ would be an understatement if I describe how I am feeling right now as  SAP Social Sabbatical Buenos Aires  finally kicked off yesterday morning at SAP Argentina. Social Sabbatical is a global pro bono program where employees provide professional services to social-mission driven clients in communities in which the employees do not live or work on a regular basis. Projects are intended to provide economic and social benefit to the local organization and community while building leadership competencies, creating market insights, and spurring innovative thinking for the participating employee. SAP Social Sabbatical team in Buenos Aires comprises of twelve of us from different countries Germany, USA, Italy, India, Taiwan, Iran, Australia, and Singapore who would be working with four different clients during the course of next four weeks.

After six weeks of extensive pre work, interesting assignments individually & virtually with the colleagues located miles away, I finally arrived on the other side of the planet late evening on April 2^nd. First morning on the next day, all 12 of us got together along with Rodrigo & Carolina from Pyxera Global, who is coordinating this complete program. We did some amazing team building exercises complete Sunday like ‘Engineers & Architects’, went on neighborhood tour & had lunch with some amazing people, who have been associated with SAP Social Sabbatical in the  past. Also we met Noel, who along with her family did this remarkable road trip from Argentina to Philadelphia in a 1980 VW minibus for the visit by Pope Francis. We started again post lunch with an activity where each one of us had to describe ourselves in our own innovative way & it was really an amazing exercise where everyone shared their life experiences & posed questions to others. Finally we ended with talking about our scope of work & clients with whom we will be working in coming weeks. The day was remarkable for me because, just in one day, I was not just able to know most of  others in the team, but also develop a kind of emotional connect with everyone. It doesn’t seems like we have met each other just some hours before.

Formal kickoff happened yesterday morning at SAP Argentina by Guillermo Brinkmann, Managing Director SAP Argentina, where we finally met our clients & they briefly presented about their organizations to everyone. Our client called ‘Junior Achievement’ is an organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hand-on-programs.  We will be working with Junior Achievement Argentina to develop a road map for digitizing JA Argentina’s education materials following the trends and demands/needs of its educators (volunteers) and students. 

Our team comprising of Fariba, Mohamed & myself finally got to meet Matias & Felicitas from Junior Achievement Argentina along with a student translator Lucia who will be helping us to communicate during the course of this assignment. We arrived at JA Argentina office in the afternoon & started with our discussions on understanding JA Argentina. Matias & Felicitas very passionately explained us about the details of different programs, how they are carried out, how extensive planning & execution is done, challenges being faced along with many other details.

  

So the groundwork is done & we have already jumped into the work. As I mentioned in the beginning that ‘Excited’ will just be an understatement for what lies ahead for us during coming four weeks.