9/1/08 - 9/4/08

Wow, what a week. 7:20 PM on Friday night is, literally, the first opportunity I have had to post another blog entry. I'm at the office by 8 AM and finally leave at 6:30 or 7 PM. After the drive back to the hotel, and dinner, I'm spent. This week, however, has been very productive and quite fun.

Monday

First day in the office. I'm here for two weeks to discuss two projects. The first project is a system to manage the process by which we request permission to do business with suppliers (requisition), create a contract with that business (contract creation), execute orders under those contracts (service orders), then receive and pay for the work (receipting and invoicing). The other project is a system that allows us to document and audit our processes for making changes to the systems our business uses.

A colleague of mine from the purchasing group is here for my first week to discuss the first project. Today, we hold our kick off meeting, meet the team we'll be working with, and go over the expectations of the project, set the agenda for the week, and do a high-level overview of the business process.

We break for lunch and eat at a nearby Malaysian restaurant. No one gets too adventurous - just really spicy. Oddly enough, we discuss the US presidential primaries. It isn't so much a discussion of who is the better candidate, more a discussion on who we think WILL win and why. I think that is a better way to discuss politics - who we think will win, not who we think SHOULD win. This changes to a discussion of the Republican philosophy - small government, private enterprise, personal responsibility - and the Democratic philosophy - government protector, state-owned/managed enterprise, wealth redistribution.

At the end of the day, my colleague and I leave the office and stop by the mall where I buy the DVD's. He is originally from India, and is stopping by Indonesia after a trip to India to work with some suppliers who are helping us in our Africa development. This is his first trip to Indonesia, so we spend too much time in the mall as he explores all the potential opportunities. I buy 11 more DVDs - Lion King 1.5 and 2, Jungle Book 2 and 3, 5 Elmo movies, Horton Hears a Who, and Bourne Supremacy. My colleague buys nothing (typical supply chain guy, didn't find anything he found a "good value"). Dinner at the club level. Having woken up at 4:00 AM and working out at 4:30, I'm exhausted by 8:30 so I crash.

Tuesday

We go in a little later today because I need to draft my fantasy football team. Draft starts at 7:45 AM. I bail at 8:30 AM after completing the first 12 rounds. Turns out, it's a good thing I delayed it. My colleague had trouble sleeping, and he had set his alarm for PM, so he didn't wake up until 8:15.

Today is one solid meeting. We spend the whole day discussing the process of requesting permission to spend money. It's amazing how many variations there are for the simple question of "can I spend money on this?" When a person wants to spend money, it has to work up their organizational hierarchy until it reaches the level of someone who has been granted authority for the dollar amount requested. At any point, someone in the hierarchy can request someone else in the organization to review the request and provide their opinion/approval. Sounds simple, but when you are automating a process, you always have to assume that something will go wrong and account for it. For example, what happens if someone has forgotten to assign someone a manager? How do we know who to route it to?

We break for lunch and this time eat at a Chinese restaurant. It is considered a high-end restaurant, though I found the food at the Malaysian restaurant better.

We finish our meetings for the day and my Indian colleague and I join a ping-pong game in the company lounge. I was concerned about playing with the Indonesians - if you watch the Olympics, you know that SE Asians are notorious for their skills in Ping Pong (Indonesia won several medals in Badminton, too, including 2 golds), and I haven't played Ping Pong in years. Turns out, my spin serve still works quite well -I scored 11 aces!

We returned to the hotel around 7:30 and went for dinner at the club level. While there, I ran into Amit whom I met on my first trip out. Seems he is still spending a lot of time in Indonesia for his business. I'm still impressed by his product. I wish I had a need for it. Having once again awoken at 4:00 AM, I'm asleep by 9:30.

Wednesday

My morning starts with an 8 AM meeting to discuss any ongoing challenges with most recently released project (the reason I was here in March). The project will go down in history as the most challenging I have ever worked on. It delivered nearly 3 months late (meaning it took almost 2x longer than expected), we had several contentious moments at the end, and, once released to production, it crashed every 10 minutes for 4 days until we isolated and resolved the issue with the application. We still have a list of about 30 items that are either ongoing issues, features we failed to deliver decided were not important enough to have another delay, or new features we've discovered we need. I left for Jakarta 1 day after resolving the production issue, so I have 2 meetings a week scheduled to talk through any current concerns.

The remainder of the day is continuing to work through the system requirements to automate our purchasing process. I'm learning a lot about our processes, and, I feel, I'm teaching a lot on how to conceptualize software in the definition/visualization phase of our efforts. We stay late - about 6:30 - to ensure we cover everything we need to before my colleague leaves. He will be with us just one more day (Thursday), and we can't have him leave without completing the end-to-end process and documenting our system design.

We dismiss our driver for the evening and join one of our local colleagues for a tour of the city. Having taken the tour twice, now, I realize that in terms of acreage, Jakarta is a very small city. When I was able to cover all of Paris in a one week trip, I thought Paris was small for such a heavily populated city. Jakarta is really just four main streets - and 18 million people crowded on them. We eat at the Hard Rock Cafe, and I take a picture of Starbucks for my wife (she wanted to know if they have them here).

Thursday

Our morning starts with a meeting with the team in Phoenix. We have a list of questions we need to come to agreement on, and we need to finalize the details of an integration with our document management application. A meeting scheduled for 2 hours ends up taking nearly 4. However, we get a lot accomplished.

Recognizing we are in for a long afternoon session, we opt to lunch at Wendy's in the building's lobby in lieu of visiting a sit-down restaurant. Turns out our discussion on nature vs. nurture and government's role in providing motivation vs. opportunity makes our lunch last an hour, anyway.

As expected, our afternoon session lasts well into early evening. We finally break for the evening at 7 PM. My colleague and return to the hotel, eat dinner at the club level, and say farewell around 9:30. He has to pack, I have another 2 hours of work to do.

I also have to check-in to my new room. When I arrived, they put me in a room on the same floor as the Presidential Suite. Apparently, after I arrived, a General with the Indonesian military decided he wanted to hold a meeting at the hotel and they needed to clear the floor. So, they move me to a new room and, to apologize for the inconvenience, they upgrade me to a suite. The suite is twice as large as the standard room. So, now I have two bathrooms, two televisions, and a place to entertain separated from a place to sleep. If only I had people to entertain!

I spend the next two hours finishing most of the work I had to do, and then try to go to sleep. That's when I hear the drip...drip....drip. I locate the source of the drip, and realize I can't fix it. I call the hotel and they send someone from engineering up to my room to take apart my toilet, replace a valve that had a leaky seal, and I'm finally off to sleep shortly after midnight. I have another 8 AM meeting on my problem project, so I'm not going to get much sleep.



Well, I'll finish updating my week tomorrow (Saturday). It's not too terribly late, but I have to awaken at 4 AM tomorrow to make a 6 AM tee time.