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.