Final presentations: Puerta 18 and SAP

Be prepared for the last on-site impressions from my Social Sabbatical in Buenos Aires. Any articles after that will be retrospectives.

Yesterday on Thursday, we delivered the final presentation at Puerta 18. But before that, we had a team task to solve: Think about and organize a present for our project assistant Juami! Only a couple of days ago, he told us how he picked up his dog - it was a street dog, and he took him into his flat. Since then, Iván is part of Juami's life. So we thought about buying something for Iván. It is a wooden tray, holding to bowls for food and water. We wrote "Thank you" in several languages on it, wrapped it in Puerta 18-purple paper and then gave it to Juami. I suppose, we really were suprising him!

We literally polished the slides until the last minute - and then had to be shorter than expected, but we think, we got across the most important points. Anyway, for Puerta 18, no breaking news was given, we worked closely together and had regular reviews. We were glad to have José Cáceres, SAP CSR Director for Latin América y del Caribe, with us for the presentation, as well as Carolina Gowland from PYXERA, as well as Cecilia Quiñones from SAP.

After our presentation, the Puerta 18 kids said goodbye to us. First, we played a game - actually, it was the Argentinean version of Kunterbunt or Dobble/Spot It. They also presented some animations that they had done during the last few weeks, such as animations of super-powers - vanishing in thin air and jumping into the picture a meter away, for example. We received a special edition of a 3D-printed item - which I can't explain right now, because I am missing the English words... (I should post pictures after returning home!) 

Thank you so much, Puerta 18 to all the kids and the great staff!!!

Today, all Social Sabbatical participants came together once more at SAP - both the SAP employees and the social partners. Short panel discussions reflected on the experience, and every team was able to talk about what they had delivered. Below, you find pictures of all the teams (sorry, I do not have photos with all team members on it together for all teams!).

Juami receiving his present

Juami shooting scenes for the video - he created a pseudo documentary that was shown today at the final event at SAP. Once he uploaded it, I will share the link!

From left to right: Janice, José, Carolina and Susana during the final presentation

Puerta 18: Susana from the staff, Enrique from the kids

Team Enseñá por Argentina

Team Junior Achievement (my apologies to project assistant Lupi - I didn't get you in the picture!)

Carolina from PYXERA in the audience

Team Puerta 18 - thanks to Koert Breebaart for taking a series of pictures from our panel!

Team Socialab - photo 1

Team Socialab - photo 2

Finish: Work on our final deliverables

During our final days, my time feels very limited. This Thursday, we have to deliver our final presentation to our client Puerta 18. At the beginning of this week, we collected our workitems. We realized that we will need to also describe some aspects a bit more in detail. Hence, we decided to start a strategy document. With this, our final handover will consist of three virtual items:

1. The wiki that I already described in an earlier posting. Our project assistant Juami has done an excellent job in translating the contents, and he also designed a great entry page.
2. The strategy document (in Word) that we just started on Monday after a brainstorming session (photo: see below) about what should be in it. 
3. The Powerpoint presentation in which we describe our approach, the process and what we finally created as deliverable for our client.

As this amount of work kept us quite busy, we spent two evenings in the conference room of our hotel. A nearby supermarket (almost every block has one) provided us with crackers, cheese, salami - and some wine! We made good progress, and before I call it a day now (last action: Publish this posting), I feel quite confident. We succeeded in finalizing the Powerpoint storyline and only have few tasks left, such as polishing some slides and re-check the content. Maybe we will even be able to perform a trial run of our presentation. Keep your fingers crossed!

As tomorrow evening, right after our presentation (which is at 4-6pm) a team dinner with special guest José Cáceres (Director of SAP CSR - Región Latin América y del Caribe) is planned. He will also be at Puerta 18 with us - and we will see him once more on Friday during the closing event at SAP Argentina. Our program will be done by Friday early afternoon, and we plan to celebrate the last evening as a team with a dinner. 

Maybe I will be able to write a posting about all this on Friday or on Saturday before leaving to the airport - or will do so right after I returned to my home town Nußloch, back to my husband Peter and our two cats Schrödinger and Kopernikus.

Important tools 1: Our list of workitems

Important tools 2: Our access to cheese and wine

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

Introducing: Juan Manuel - project assistant of the Puerta 18 team

This Social Sabbatical is also some sort of pilot: Based on the experience that language sometimes is a problem, Pyxera decided to try something new. Every of our four subteams here in Buenos Aires are collaborating with a project assistant. The task of a project assistant is to contribute to the team work with translations, but also by participating in the teamwork altogether.

So let me introduce our team assistant today: Juan Manuel Cafferata, 21 years old, in his third year of studying political sciences at the UBA (Universidad de Buenos Aires). He is also very active in filming and doing animation films - in our breaks he showed us quite a couple of great clips and short films! Have a look at his homepage.

For our team, he is a great help. His English is very good, so the translations go very smoothly. As both Rob and I speak some Spanish, but Juami - how he likes to be called - is a great help to keep us all on the same level of information.

Apart from the language, he has become a full member of the team, contributing ideas and collaborating on solutions by summarizing and structuring information as well as searching for solutions.

For our team, this pilot is definitely successful, and we can only strictly recommend to Pyxera to keep this idea and provide every future Social Sabbatical team with a project assistant!

Juan Manuel Cafferata - our project assistant

Second weekend: Las Cataratas de Iguazú

It is weekend time again! Eight team members of Los Buenos joined the tour to the Iguazú waterfall, starting on Saturday morning, coming back on Sunday late evening.

Disclaimer: Photos will be following later!

Saturday: After arriving, we checked in to the hotel - as we stayed only one night, we decided to book the Sheraton. This is the only hotel inside the National Park. Hence, all activities within the park can be reached by walking there.

First, we booked a boat tour. By speed boat, they take you to the falls from the lower part of the river. After boarding, the first part shows only the river, but suddenly, the falls got into our view. That was the time for the pictures before putting the camera to the water proof sacks that were provided. After that, the boat went right into the area where the falling water splashes into the river. Shower time!!! With the hot temperature outside and the humidity, this even was a refreshment that was very welcome.

After the boat ride, we took the small train that brings tourists to the Devil's Throat, the part of the falls where you can't get to from below by boat. They constructed trails like bridges on which you can walk close to the rim and take photos.

Our day ended with a pleasant team dinner, full of conversations about the falls and much more. Before falling asleep, we had a look at the stars of the Southern hemisphere.

Sunday: Let me keep this short: Two more hikes with great views and lots and lots of photos today.

Photos will follow in a separate posting  tomorrow! For now, we are cooling down with a beer and a snack before returning to Buenos Aires.

Puerta 18: Continuing our work - update from week 2

Since my last posting, we have been quite busy with our work with the Puerta 18 team. Let me share some aspects.

During our work in the Puerta 18 office, we also have quite some opportunity to observe how they work with the kids. Take the example of the daily activity: It is part of Puerta 18's program to offer one activity per day. The current activities are presented at the "green table", where all kids and coordinators come together. Today, it was Flash animation. The idea was to create an animation of e.g. an animal that is eating some food - the food should move into the animal's mouth. 

Our colleague Rob worked next to one of the kids and followed the instructions of ever-patient and friendly coordinator Stefanie. She really has a great way of breaking down the task into steps that were easy to follow and execute. This task is designed to be achievable within a few hours, so the kids have a successful result at the end. Especially new kids, being at Puerta 18 for the first time, have an easy access to participation here. The general idea is that from here, the kids get to know different technologies and develop their own ideas for projects. They can form teams and collaborate on whatever they like - as long as it has to do with any of the technology aspects that Puerta 18 can offer. The coordinators assist in finding such ideas, building teams, and working on the projects.

For our scope of work, we made quite some progress. Yesterday, we had a Skype call with Kane Milne from High Tech Youth Network in New Zealand. He and Puerta 18 director Federico know each other from Clubhouse Network activities. Puerta 18 is member of this network, and Kane also was active in this network - however, the large distance from New Zealand to any network conferences or meetings that are mostly taking place in the USA, made it very difficult (and expensive!) to participate. He then founded the High Tech Youth Network. For us, this means he has experience with opening new locations and running them - and thus could give us many insights in the resulting tasks and challenges.

We now have to process a lot of information. Our team work changes between group work and breaking down tasks for individual work - so every one of our four team members (not only the three SAP people, but also our project assistant Juan Manuel are fully dedicated and passionate about the project!) can work separately. After some time, we then get back together and review our individual stuff - so everything is aligned and fits together.

One of the tasks was creating a questionnaire for the kids. Rob has a lot of experiences here, as he comes from marketing. Together with Juan Manuel and the Puerta 18 team, he prepared and launched it today - we hope to get further input for the section of our scope of work that will illustrate both the philosophy (including vision and mission) and the success stories - aiming at attracting potential sponsors. The first ten kids already participated, and it already looks promising. During the next weeks, we will continue running this.

Outlook: Starting Saturday morning, eight team members of Los Buenos will be away to Iguazu. The next blog posting will be posted after our return on Sunday evening, so I will probably be able to write again no earlier than Monday. I will then get back to our work with Puerta 18 at the beginning of next week, so expect to learn more about our work on Tuesday or Wednesday.

The green table (look at the photo, and you will understand where the name comes from!): The kids and the coordinators gather to talk about the daily activities

In the middle of the daily activity: Coordinator Stefanie explains how to create a Flash animation - Rob is participating, Janice is watching

Yesterday, we saw the kids creating this overview about breakthrough inventions around communication - today, I am appreciating the result

Back to work: Second week with Puerta 18

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: 

1. 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! 
2. Define a "business syntax" for future presentations to potential sponsors. 
3. 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?
4. What are important aspects of running a new location? Again, we will collect input into a toolkit.
5. 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.

Today, another of the four SAP Social Sabbatical teams - they are working with Junior Achievement - visited Puerta 18

First week with Puerta 18

My last blog posting was about the opera, which means I have to cover three days altogether about Puerta 18 where we spent a lot of time this week. Our main task was to listen - and maybe to ask some questions that encourage our interview partners to get even deeper into the topics. And as we were interested in almost every aspect that concerns Puerta 18, this was a promising task.

Our scope of work for this Social Sabbatical is to work with Puerta 18 on a concept on how to open new locations for Puerta 18. For this purpose, we tried to find out what makes this place special. During our first two days, we already learnt a lot. For the rest of the week, we went more deeply into this and thus could check some details and elaborate further on others.

On Wednesday, the Pyxera team came to visit Puerta 18 in order to see how everything goes, both from Puerta 18's perspective and from ours. Rodrigo and Carolina from Pyxera, as well as Social Sabbatical alumni Eliana came by. We worked a bit on collecting all aspects that are important for the new locations of Puerta 18. For this purpose, we used large Post Its, collected all points on a wall. Later, we rearranged them and had Federico and Carolina from Puerta 18 select their priorities from this collection. With this methodology, we confirmed together with Puerta 18 that we did not leave out any important aspects. In addition, the priorities will directly flow into our revised scope of work.

For the remaining time of this week, we talked to some kids in Puerta 18. First, we did this very informally by just stepping by, having some chats and just collecting impressions. Today, we thought about a short list of questions and conducted two interviews - one with Henrique, 16 years old, another with Amanda, 22 years old. The video interview was filmed with Puerta 18 equipment - we will need it later on for the translation, as the interviews themselves were held in Spanish. Our project assistant Juan Manuel will provide us with subtitles. With both kids (well, if you still want to call a >20 year old one a "kid"... - in Puerta 18, we felt that this expression is used very respectfully and full of pride), the interviews ended very emotionally, as both expressed that Puerta 18 is a special and unique place for them. It was a very touching experience, and also one that confirmed to us that all work really is worth the effort!

Meeting of our subteam with Puerta 18 staff (Carolina and Federico) and Pyxera staff (Rodrigo and Carolina, as well as Social Sabbatical alumni Eliana)

Rob presenting our work with the collection of aspects for new Puerta 18 locations - the exercise was quite helpful to get an idea of the completeness (confirm with Puerta 18's view) and the priorities

Graphics design is one activity that Puerta 18 offers - this girl is into anime and showed me her designs

This girl and her team work on a brochure for an art museum - with some games around famous paintings

Rob and his interview partner Henrique are waiting to start their conversation in front of the camera

The Social Sabbatical Puerta 18 team (from left to right: Rob, Janice, myself) - one week of very eventful, but successful work is behind us! Looking forward to continuing next week - stay tuned!

Opera at Teatro Colon

On April 6 - the first Wednesday of our assignment - six of Los Buenos went to the opera! As I am an opera enthusiast, I asked the team quite early who would like to join for an evening with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni. By performing the following steps, I booked the tickets:

• Ask your friend Google for help.
• Tickets at Teatro Colon are bought here: https://www.tuentrada.com/colon/Online/
• You need to enter your passport number and prepay the tickets with a credit card.
• Pick up the tickets at the boletería (ticket office) at Teatro Colón by presenting your confirmation number, passport, and the credit card used for the purchase. It is a good idea to do so with sufficient time before the performance - in our case we were able to take a deviation to the Teatro two days before the performance.
• Doing so with the right timing (i.e. when the sales for a performance opens) will secure you great seats! 
• Before entering, check your ticket: There are several entrances, yours is printed on the ticket. Ours was the Libertad entrance - the central one.

As we opted for a "función extraordinaria" (FE), the prices were absolutely affordable, even for top seats. You won't see the top singers in the FE, but also the second ones were great, and the whole experience is really, really worth it!

With some time ahead, we left at the hotel, so we could have something to drink and eat a bit before entering the theatre. Of course, all of us needed some time to look around and take some pictures. Our seats were in row 4 - this meant we had a great view. The subtitles - that are above the stage, thus should rather be called "overtitles"? - were both in Spanish and in English. It was hence very convenient to follow the plot. For me personally, it was a very impressive visit, and as it happens to me frequently with operas, I was feeling the emotions of the music through and through.

Let me share some impressions after two disclaimers:

Disclaimer 1: As I did not bring the large camera, the quality of my photos with the cell phone is not the same than in the other postings.
Disclaimer 2: Two of the photos were taken by Rob Glickman who permitted me to use them - thank you, Rob!

The Teatro Colón building of today was built around 1900

You really should take some time to walk around the theatre! Our seats gave us access to the entrance area of the Libertad.

View from the back to the stage.

Detail view into one of the first floor loges. Four more floors above this follow.

The six Los Buenos al Teatro: Fariba, Rob, myself, Sven, Rosemary, Tina (from left to right; photo courtesy of Rob Glickman)

The final applause - all eight singers and the conductor on stage (photo courtesy of Rob Glickman)

Starting work with Puerta 18

One day without blogging leaves me in charge to cover two days - and what two days I have to cover. Yesterday, we went to SAP Argentina for this Social Sabbatical's official kick-off. Every team met their clients for the first time - and so did we with Federico from Puerta 18 and our interpreter and assistant Juan Manuel.

The afternoon we spent at Puerta 18. On Mondays, activities are only half-day, and only with the young people of age 18+. We started our first long interview with Federico and learnt a lot about what Puerta 18 offers to the target audience of young people between 13 and 24 years. Our understanding about who attends Puerta 18, which staff works with the kids, and what the philosophy of Puerta 18 is, made a huge step forward. Here are some great quotes that we heard both yesterday and today (I am also using Rob's notes to come up with these):

• Do not make consumers, make creators.
• The ideas is not to know – it’s to learn with the kids.
• We are producers of the ideas of the kids.
• Close the gaps.
• It's about learning, not teaching.
• ... and there were many more ...

Today, we returned to Puerta 18 and met the staff of Puerta 18, amongst them Carolina who was our second interview partner. The picture she provided was very consistent with what Federico talked about, and together with all the input that we received today, we tried to understand the architecture of the organization and started collecting the main categories into which we will need to look for our scope of work.

All in all, we spent two packed days at Puerta 18, lgot deep insights, received a really very friendly and enthusiastic welcome, felt the passion of the Puerta 18 staff and learnt incredibly much. To wrap up the day, we meeted with the other three groups and exchanged our experiences from the first two days. The range was from "we almost suspect our client's scope of work is too narrow" from one team until "we are facing quite some challenge in narrowing our client's scope of work" from another.

But now for the photo impressions of these two days:

From left to right: Rob, myself, Federico, director of Puerta 18 (center), Janice and Juan Manuel, who helps us a lot with his translations

First glimpse into Puerta 18 - a team working on creativity techniques, watched by Janice and Federico

Puerta 18 is about leveraring the ideas of the young people between 13 and 24 years old

Interviewing and learning from Puerta 18 coordinator Carolina (center) - together with Janice (right) and Juan Manuel (left)

View into Puerta 18: Young people working on the computer - being there, you are breathing a very concentrated and creative atmosphere

Creativity with 3D-printing

First team day

Today, we had a day packed of information and team exercises. This was still team internal - tomorrow, we will have the formal kick-off with the clients at SAP Argentina.

Just let me share some impressions:

Get to know each other with human bingo - and our agenda for today

Social Sabbatical alumni Eliana explains the strategy of SAP's Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Koert is creating a documentary about the Social Sabbatical - you see him in full action here

Our neighborhood walk took us from the hotel to the Plaza Italia with its monument

Clara and myself at Plaza Italia (thanks to Rob for taking this picture!)

Neighborhood walk continued: Carnicería (Butchery) in disguise! (Actually, inside there was in fact meet on display...)

Rodrigo explaining the next exercises: "Architects" will explain a "prototype" to the "engineers" - and they have to build it

Considering the fact that we only were allowed to talk (no photos! no drawings!) the results of our team's engineers (on the right) is quite close to the prototype (on the left). Great teamwork, everyone!

Team lunch at a parrilla - it was delicious!

Finally: A place to relax in our hotel garden