Working in Africa

The pace is definately slower here. Way slower.

Whenever you ask someone how they are doing, they always tell you “busy busy busy”. To me everyting seems inefficient here compared to home. For example, the way meeting invites are sent. You are supposed to send a printed meeting invite about one week ahead of the suggested time. You will then get the invite back signed by the person who received it. This, however, will not yet mean that the person will be available to join the meeting. It only confirmes that the invitation has been received. I surely hope that the intranet and the mail/calendar system will be up and running soon.

Last Friday, at the ICT Department meeting the Head of Administraion was asking if any of the department staff have any issues. At first no one said anything. When she insisted a couple of times, people finally started to come up with issues that probably have been mentioned in each monthly meeting. One guy from the Networking unit said his issue is that he doesn’t have access to internet.. When analysing the problem in more detail they found out this guy doesn’t even have a computer or a table. Imagine that! It seems that at least at the government level the Nigerians are somewhat reactive rather than proactive… Anyway we have now proposed that they will start collecting all the issues in an issue log and publish it at the notice board so that the department management has visibility to the issues and the staff can see who is taking care of them and by when.

We had scheduled our first workshop on current situation analysis for Friady at 12:00. We managed to get everyone in the meeting room at around 15:00 and that’s just when we started to find a projector, look for whiteboard and markers etc. We had asked the team to have those at hand, but you know asking isn’t the same as getting. In the middle of the workshop someone brought us few markers that we were happy to start using immediately just to find afterwards that they were permanent ones… Had a pretty productive workshop though regardless of all the drawbacks.

Yesterday was our second workshop on stakeholder analysis. 15 minutes before we were supposed to start we found out that there are still no markers or post-its. Greg took our driver and one of the girls from the office to Marian Market to buy the stationery while I organised the cleaning of the whiteboard and finding & setting up the screen for the projector. This time we started only 40 minutes late, but when I was in a middle of the presentation the power went off and the generator refused to start going. So we ended up having a casual converstation for a bit less than half an hour before being able to continue. The post-its didn’t quite stick to the still slightly wet whiteboard, but otherwise we were able to run the workshop as planned.

Today we have been documenting our findings and preparing ourselves for the next workshops. On Friday we should actually deliver our first awareness session on Enterprise Architecture. We prepared and printed homework to the team hoping to get them more involved. There’s only so much we can do in one month so we really want the local team to start taking ownership. I hope that by the end of the month they feel that they have learnt something valuable and that we have provided them with tools that can utilise in the future.