Day 15 – Three lessons in ‘Nothing is easy’

By bogaert

Today, we looked back on what our team did over the past two weeks and discussed how we could move forward. During the past week we had daily meetings with clients, so towards our clients we made great progress and keep on interacting with them. I asked our program manager Lesley to give these clients a call after two of our meeting to measure the client satisfaction. Actually, the feedback was that our meetings were greatly appreciated. A happy client is always great, but I’m still very concerned about our approach and our capability to complete the statement of work within the remaining timeframe with good quality. Conclusion so far, this is not going to be easy, but my great teammates will jump in for sure! Nothing is easy … but let us move forward in the right direction!

Last Sunday we planned with the team a visit for the upcoming weekend to the Wuyi Mountains. These are in the north of the province Fujian and known for the tall dolomite rocks rising out of the river with 9 bends. It looked all promising; Lesley from DOT and me on behalf of the team, with support of two translators, negotiated the contract with the official authorized local travel agent. It took hours to nail the contract down on Wednesday, making sure we didn’t make a mistake and we had everything in the price as we need it. But yesterday came a big surprise, the travel agent came back that he was not able to block enough seats to bring us there on Saturday. Actually, we had to advice him to renegotiate with the airline company and also to contact another company. Still weird we have to tell them what they could try to fix the problem. Whatever we tried, no real acceptable solution could be found. Finally, we fully blamed the agent and request a full refund of our down payment. The good thing is that each of us got his money back, but the promising weekend is gone. These kind of loose promises are a real pain for me and bad for my condition. It takes far too much time and energy to fix a simple thing like this. Everything cancelled, so today back to plan B. I hired a bus for tomorrow and half of the team will join to visit the Hakka houses. Nothing is easy … but let us see what tomorrow will bring.

#ibmcsc china
Elaine and Cecily

Elaine and Cecily helping us to survive through translation

I also ordered some stuff online and had it shipped to my hotel. Though it would be easy and delivered within a couple of days. Actually, it took a week and even one of the parcels was returned to the sender. Now I found out why, you have to provide your mobile phone number to the sender. He writes the mobile phone number on the parcel and at delivery they call this number. If they can not reach you, the package is returned. Nothing is easy … but first and second package delivered, third one is back at the sender and returned again to me. Again a lesson learned.

Late afternoon I decided to back to the Gu Lang Yu Island. Joined by Cecily and Elaine we took the ferry and walked along the shoreline. We enjoyed watching the raising city of Xiamen in the dark on the other side of the water. Talking with them was fun, and I had the impression they also enjoyed it.

Gu Lang Yu