The past weekend was full of impressions outside work. Like this, we could "charge the batteries" and get a start into another week full of work on our scope with Puerta 18. Hence, be prepared for an article about our work: Lots of text, almost no photos.
Yesterday was Monday. This weekday is not very busy at Puerta 18, this is why we decided to stay in the hotel and go through the material that we already have and make up our plans on the next steps.
Last Friday, our final activity was to finalize our scope of work description. With this, both the Puerta 18 and our team have confirmed their understanding about what we will deliver at the end of our assignment. These are the five pillars of this agreement:
- Provide Puerta 18 with marketing fundamentals on their vision and mission - any new location of Puerta 18 in the future is supposed to follow this vision and mission!
- Define a "business syntax" for future presentations to potential sponsors.
- Collect as much input as possible and compile it into a toolkit: What are the ingredients and steps for opening a new Puerta 18 location?
- What are important aspects of running a new location? Again, we will collect input into a toolkit.
- Provide an overview of all persons that are somehow involved in Puerta 18. Make this visible in order to being able to extract information for the future setup with more locations.
This structure also allowed us to divide the work into several portions. We quickly figured out that we had a problem with distributed information - every team member had separate notes. To centralize this information, we started collaborating on a spreadsheet on Google Drive. This is very convenient, as several people can edit the same document. We quickly started opening tab after tab, filled them and got back to re-arrange the information and also connect the different tabs, e.g. in order to collect the items that we have to do to be displayed automatically in a separate tab, allowing us to track our progress.
One by one, we went through our five pillars and had brainstorming sessions on several of them. In these, we collected many ideas on which we will work during the next days. This sort of work is very intensive - we all started throwing ideas at each other, just to get it picked up and continued by another person!
Today, we were at Puerta 18, but took some time to get into detail work. While Rob was starting refining the marketing fundamentals, and Janice did some research on franchises in general, I worked on the people map. As our starting point was all what we had heard about how Puerta 18 works today, what plans they have and what expectations, we collected our first ideas and started our first design starting from this understanding. Getting back to how franchises (or similar constructions) work and compare it to what we came up with was very helpful: After all, many of our results fitted quite consistently with the results of our research.
This evening, we then had another team meeting in which all four subteams presented their current status. All four presentations had a different focus - also reflecting the different backgrounds of all twelve Los Buenos team members! All four teams had already gone into a great level of detail work - after refining their scope of work. Spending another almost three hours in the evening after a full workday in a team meeting also has some tiring aspects. But this exchange with the other teams is very important to compare the challenges and approaches!
The final and only photo I have for you is from the visit of another Los Buenos team at Puerta 18. They wanted to learn how Puerta 18 works with the kids and see whether there were synergies between this place and their plan to digitalize their client's learning materials.
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| Today, another of the four SAP Social Sabbatical teams - they are working with Junior Achievement - visited Puerta 18 |
