Assignment Over, but a lifetime of memories still being built

Its been three weeks since we played  Andrea Bocelli's  "Time to Say GoodBye" as each of us left for the airport in Sofia. The Bulgaria 1 CSC team's assignment in Sofia is over. But this is just the beginning of a life long friendship for us, the "Young and Crazy" #CSCBul1 team. We are busy making plans for a reunion in Tokyo in 2020 with us staking claim to different corners in Shiori's small apartment in Tokyo. Poor Shiori is not being given a chance to say no. Naveen said it well "We worked together as friends, and lived like a family" during our month long stay in Hilton, Sofia.

People ask me, "Why do you think CSC is such a great program?" and I have to say, I still can't bottle up and articulate the reason why I am so bright eyed and bushy tailed since coming back from my assignment. Was it the work I did with the Bulgarian Agency for Transplantation, in developing a roadmap for them to make intelligent use of the data they were gathering so that more transplants can be facilitated and lives saved in Bulgaria? Was it the knowledge I gained from my colleagues about areas that each of them is an expert it - Design Thinking tips from Neha, Ricardo and Shiori; Powerpoint skills from Ricardo; Excel, Business Intelligence solutions and Python scripts to massage data to extract patterns from Gilberto, Tao and Alex; photography skills from Shiori; story telling tips from the Caro, the master story teller; professorial presentation skills from Naveen; Marketing tips from Jason and Josephine? Or was it just the feeling of being outside my comfort zone and spending most of my waking hours having fun with folks from seven different countries I had not met before  for one whole month without the distraction of daily life? How can I forget our local guardian, Angel Spasov, from Pyxera Global who was charged with looking after us. Each and every person we interacted with from the people at the Non Profit Organizations we worked at, to the local IBMers, were warm and welcoming.

There are people all over the world who are working hard to make a social impact in their society. Each of us has the power to make a difference and political and cultural boundaries fade away when we all join hands in community service.

I am very thankful to IBM for providing me this opportunity to leave my day job behind and experience this month long philanthropic immersion in a foreign country. I am also thankful to my management chain and teammates for picking up the slack when I was away. And I am thankful to my family for supporting me as I embarked on this trip.

It may have been "Time to Say Goodbye" to my CSC family, but rest assured, we have many more collective memories to be built.

Gathering Requirements and Designing a Solution

Meeting external clients, listening to their requirement and designing a solution has been a great learning experience for me. Different stakeholders come with their own agendas and stories keep changing. Its like a detective work to figure out what will actually bring value to the client. While we did not use formal design thinking methods in our project, we used concepts like empathy map to think of questions to ask the stakeholders.

Tomorrow we get to deliver the final presentation to the client, fingers crossed that it has what they are looking for.

Personally, besides gaining experience as a technical consultant, I also learned some powerpoint, image editing and design thinking techniques from my other CSC teammates. I also got exposure to the healthcare field and challenges faced by doctors and hospital administrators. And while this was not a "planned" visit, I also got to see the inside of the ER in a hospital here as a patient!!! And thanks to the "connections" at the client site,  Dr Semyonova , the CEO of agency for transplantation sent a driver and an assistant with me to the hospital.

Assignment Notification

The moment was here — the email inviting me to join a CSC team. Hands tingling with excitement, I opened the email to find out that I have been assigned to the Bulgaria team. No word on who my teammates were or what we would be doing. First thing I did was to locate Bulgaria on a map ( sad state of my geography knowledge!). Once the news began to sink in, along with my excitement came nervousness — tasks I need to complete at work, things to take care of at home, security concerns, and million other small worries. But the paramount feeling was one of standing at the bottom of the hill and having been given a ticket to embark on this fantastic journey.

I am a software engineer at IBM and I want to capture all the moments in this once in a lifetime opportunity to be part of the IBM Corporate Service Corps teams.