A busy working week is close to an end … we have worked hard this week, most days only leaving the hotel for food – or to continue work with slightly more bandwidth and better supply of hot (and cold) coffee or tea based beverages at Starbucks.

Today we have finalized the first presentation for one client and handed it over to the interns for translation. Tomorrow – Friday – will be a short day; I plan a couple of hours in the morning to review and prepare for my part of the presentation – the final presentation meeting with that client is scheduled for Monday afternoon.

Around midday we then plan to leave for Yichang – and the Yangtze river … and a weekend on a cruise boat. I had done that before – more than six years back, before the dam had been finished, I am really curious to see how the scenery changed.

See my photos from six years back – dam (under construction) and the big and little three gorges. Current photos will follow on Sunday or Monday.

Getting there … job-wise

Today was a busy day; in the morning we continued with the work on our individual bits of the presentation for one of our clients. We then spent (once more) most of the afternoon at Starbucks to start reviewing slides and putting the overall slide deck together.

We also involved the interpreters into that effort to ensure we convey the correct message and meaning, when the slides are finally translated to Chinese.

Getting there … weekend-plan

Today was also a milestone in the planning for the upcoming weekend (in PM talk one could call today ‘Plan Exit’) … we signed the contract with the travel agent and will leave Wuhan on Friday to go for a Yangtze cruise over the weekend.

Getting there indeed was a milestone … the steps to come to an agreement over the final contract included extensive discussions within our team, numerous visits to the travel agent, review of several options, detailed study of the proposed itinerary and proposed contract – including a final discussion down to footnote level.

Given my travel arranger role (that I somehow got assigned in the first couple of days), I found myself at one stage today with an amount of cash (11.4 K Yuan) that I would consider huge even from a European standpoint …

Overall we are getting there … our first presentation should be ready for translation tomorrow – and the weekend will be there to celebrate and relax on the Yangtze 😉

Today we had one of those typical working days; spending most of the morning working on research and creating presentation with a level-set meeting in between.

In the afternoon my sub-team headed for the office of the local IBM branch – mainly for connectivity reasons (the bandwidth in the hotel is shared … so during the weekend it was acceptable, while now it is not reliable at all). On top of that most things outside the Great Firewall come in slowly (independent on where one connects … hotel, office or Starbucks) with unpredictable blocking occurring (e.g. yesterday I could not access ibm.com from the hotel; facebook remains a 50:50 joker, some also have issues with wikipedia and google).

So we decided to use our connections (or guānxì / 关系 as the locals say) to get into the IBM office to at least do our research without excessive waiting times … we were still behind the Firewall though …

In the late afternoon we had a meeting with the local IBM management to get an introduction to IBM [Central] China and the situation of the region.

After the meeting we had dinner before heading back to the hotel.

Today was a brain-storming day, for us – the manufacturing team – mainly three questions had to be looked at

• specific questions / requests for clarifications for our first client
• high-level setup of the agenda for the presentations
• review of the available data and material, to get it sorted by topic and relevance

Based on the internet connection speed and the good availability of coffee, tea and all sorts of cheese cake, we decided to spend the day at the local Starbucks outlet (on the other side of the street from our hotel) – as did all the other groups.

Given the intake of coffee and tea, we had some fruitful discussion and ended up with a good list of questions to ask, as well as an approach on how to continue. We got back to the hotel for further work (i.e. a deep dive into the material) only after having tried a good selection of cake.

Let’s see how it goes … but one thing is sure, I have neither worked a full day in Starbucks before, nor did I go through a working dinner in the backroom of a Chinese restaurant (see yesterday’s blog entry) … we still need to decide, where to head for tomorrow – so, let’s see 😉

Working Dinner

Yesterday it worked … the note Elaine had prepared for us did the job; based on the note we “became” Buddhist Vegetarians and thus ended up with true vegetarian dishes.

This turned out to be a manufacturing team only dinner, so we used the opportunity to continue the discussion on our Statement of Work before and around dinner… we even had our little meeting room 🙂

Night Market

Today Claire, Deepak and myself took a walk through one of the night markets; on the way we also made new friends 😉