Day 11 - IBM Training Session

One of our key deliverables from our CSC assignment was to be a training session for the ECG staff to learn about ITIL and Service Management concepts.  The session was scheduled for today

The session was to be 3 hours, from 9 - 12.  There were to be 3 presenters and I had the last 30 minute time slot.  We had spent much of the previous evening preparing our presentations and doing a dry run.  We debated whether we had enough slides, too many slides, whether the materials were too technical or not technical enough.  We rehearsed, counted slides and refined the agenda several times.

Our ECG colleagues had provided us with a list of attendees and we closely scrutinized the list closely.  There were 35 attendees across 6 different ECG organizations scheduled to attend.  We had clarified the agenda with our ECG colleagues on Friday who directed us to leave 30 minutes mid-morning for "snack" and that the presentation would be followed by lunch at the training centre.

At 9:00 AM this morning we were ready to go - dressed in suits and ties, projectors on and connected to our Powerpoint presentations.  The only catch was that there were less than 10 people in attendance.  We had forgotton to plan for Ghanaian time!  We waited several minutes and then were directed to proceed.  Our ECG host introduced us and away we went.

Over the course of the first hour, the attendees began to trickle in.  We actually stopped the meeting and did introductions two times after the original introductions were complete.  We also ended up re-presenting the first 5 minutes worth of materials because the majority of the ECG attendees were not in attendance for any of the content.

Denis  (IBM Brazil) presenting Service Management concepts
and an introduction to ITIL

Ranga (IBM India) presenting Incident and Asset Management

In the end the training session went very well and our client seemed generally impressed with the presentation.  It drew lively conversation at the end which is generally a good sign - particularly in Ghana since we have learned that if they don't understand something they generally don't ask for clarification

Lunch break at the ECG training centre after the morning's training session

No one seemed particularly phased by the staggered start to the meeting and there did not seem to be a particular reason for the lack of timely attendance by over half of the attendees.  Our hosts just shrugged and put it down to the fact that it was the morning after a long weekend - it was to be expected in Ghana after all!