Forming, Storming, Storming, Storming ... Norming, Performing!

Seems that blogging after I go for a morning run is a good strategy ... as my fingers and brain are about the only parts of my body that aren't exhausted !!

This week so far has been a case of ups and downs and ups. We started the week trying to map out our schedule for the remaining 3 weeks of the assignment so we'd have something to march to. It was a good exercise even tough it took a lot of time, discussion and debate, but we got there in the end and nobody fell out with each other :o)

One of the main things we noticed was that we had to build in a lot of buffer! The Brazilian pace of doing things is far more relaxed so things like meetings sliding a day or so is very common, it will be tough to try and stick to the plan, but as the saying goes - fail to plan, plan to fail!

Tuesday began with a television interview with the Redes Minas station. They wanted to show us working in our client location and to find out our impressions of Brazil and working with our client. It was a bit of fun as we had to luck all animated, so I said I'd borrow some habits of our good Italian colleague Andrea :o) It was shown the following day, and if we can get a clip I'll throw it up in my next post.

Overall though Tuesday was a tough day for everyone I think, we had to really get into the meat of what were our concrete deliverables that we needed to produce in the time available. We basically had a day of debating which was so tiring and mentally draining. To be honest it felt like we were never going to get out of the 'storming' phase of team development.

As luck would have it Bruno, our IBM CSC focal point was with us for some of the day and he helped us get to the conclusion that in fact despite all our different approaches, phrases and definitions of things we were largely talking about doing the same things! We weren't so sure, but we called it a day all hoping that we'd have a hallelujah moment the following day :o)

Wednesday arrived and funnily enough, after a nights sleep and some reflection we all agreed that we should sit down with a few of the local team members are just chat about some of their processes. As we walked through things we all gradually came to the same conclusion of what we really needed to do and produce. It was a really positive group moment, one we needed to be honest.

So now we're all rowing in the same direction and have a much better idea of how we all think and articulate our thoughts and opinions. Even though we hit some rough patches along the way we learned a lot from it and are the better for it. Looking forward to a productive remainder of the week !


Last weekend we did two day trips, one to Ouro Preto - a really cool town, and one to Jardim Canada to the home of Joanne, the head of Casa de Jardim, which is one of the other team's client. Both were really good days, so here's a few pictures.

Later, Paddy
#ibmcsc Brazil