CSC Morocco 8 - Learning to work and play well together

Take 15 IBMers from 9 different countries who all do different jobs and have different skills and levels of seniority and experience and throw them together into 4 projects with 3 different clients; add in a mix of languages and culture and you have one big melting pot of interesting personalities and approaches. One of the goals of the IBM Corporate Service Corps experience is simply learning how to work together as colleagues in an environment that is often poorly defined and shifts rapidly in terms of priorities, expectations and deliverables.

In our subteam of 4 we've settled into different roles that I think form part of our "comfort zone", while we also push ourselves to take on different roles and responsibilities that stretch us.

Left to right - Janelle, Juan, Frank, Boris, Lucy, Jack, Saikat, Krishnendu, Glenn, Karen, Kim, Ye, Philip, Dina, Annie.

Karen - "The Translator" - I'm the only member of the group who speaks French so my role was easy to define. I'm the spokesperson for the group when we speak with members of our host organization who either cannot speak English or find it extremely difficult to communicate in English. I've also translated documents from French to English so the entire team can benefit from reading the data.

Saikat - "The Thinker" - Saikat is a deep thinker with a strong educational background and the ability to think broadly and strategically. He's taking all the various inputs from the client and coalescing them into a high-level strategy document, which will be used for 2 of the deliverables for the project.

Lucy - "The Organizer" - Lucy has strong organization and communication skills. She set up our Box file repository and maintains it so we don't lose any of our artifacts. She's also pulling together our disparate deliverables into one cohesive presentation. At the same time she's working on one of the major deliverables herself with great focus and determination.

Frank - "The Details Man" - Frank has been plowing through lots of data, websites, pages and content to do research related to one of our major deliverables which is a "current state" assessment of the client's existing web portal. He has great energy, motivation and integrity and he provides needed reminders to the rest of us about maintaining our client focus and ensuring we stick to our mandate of "corporate social responsibility".

It's a privilege to work with these other dedicated IBMers who are displaying so many of our IBM values and practices, especially: "Unite to get it done now" and "Listen for need, envision the future" and "Put the client first".