April 21, 2016

Third week with Puerta 18: Meetings and Deliverables

By the number of postings from weekends - compared with posting about work - you might get the impression that this trip was mainly about leisure. It isn't! Let me talk a bit about what we did at work.

This week was quite intense concerning work. We only have one more week to go - next Thursday at this time, our final presentation to Puerta 18 already is over, and only the final meeting at SAP Argentina on Friday, April 28, is ahead of us. The time really flew by!

Here are some aspects we worked on - beware of business terms! (You have been warned!)

Our client Puerta 18 is funded to a large extent by IRSA, a real estate company. Of course, this foundation needs to agree and support the growth plans of Puerta 18. For this reason, we asked for a meeting with the head of the foundation. This Wednesday, we met Paula Solsona and presented our findings and key deliverables. Our impression was that the meeting was very pleasant, and we hope that we could bring across our ideas and thus leverage Puerta 18's growth!

One central idea that we had was to provide Puerta 18 with operational tools - on the one hand to help with the growth, on the other hand also for operational stuff. We decided to collect all our input for Puerta 18 into a Wiki. This can then be used by the Puerta 18 team, e.g. in order to enter information about activities, workshops, but also sponsor contacts and the business language for talking to sponsors, press, and more.

For this purpose, we are using a Wiki from http://pbworks.com - it is free and quite easy to use! Quite some time was spent into thinking about how to structure the Wiki - after all, a LOT of information shall be contained while still providing a good user experience.

Today, we presented our first ideas to the Puerta 18 team. A demo showed how team members could be entered into the system. Here, they can update their own profile. By using searching and tagging, lists of all team members can easily be automatically created - both for all staff and per location (which will be interesting as soon as Puerta 18 has more locations).

Fortunately, the feedback was very promising - we are eager to learn whether and how the team will use the Wiki! For now, our main portion of work will consist of filling the Wiki with life!

While some aspects such as the Vision and Mission statements are already ready for final reviews, our approach to business language still required some clarification and structuring. This is why we spent quite some time on brainstorming today. We found out that we should take a look at this from two different perspectives: 1. What can Puerta 18 offer to potential sponsors? 2. Which results would appeal potential sponsors?

Brainstorming in our team is applied as follows: We decide for a topic and goal to discuss. Then we start to collect as many aspects as possible around this topic. By clustering them, we start throwing ideas at each other. This dynamically transfers into a development of different ideas that we discuss on the spot. From there, we try to derive a structure, results, and workitems. Very frequently, we came up with ideas that neither of us would have thought about before! This is really teamwork at its best!

In our session today, we found out that the reasons for a sponsoring can vary widely - and we figured out more about Puerta 18's unique DNA. Tomorrow will surely be very busy once more with more work on this - and we will enter our results directly in the Wiki!

One more week to go - and we also have to prepare our final presentation!

Brainstorming about Business Language