Week 7: The One with the Fourth of July

 7/5/16 – 7/7/2016

After the long weekend, I return for week seven of work! Monday morning, I finished all of my CDFs. Come July 11^th, they will all be published to our US and Canadian websites. In addition, I continued working on the IBM certs. I was also able to sit in on a meeting to discuss the annual salary survey that GK produces. They were brainstorming ideas to encourage more partner participation in the survey. It was really interesting to listen to everyone’s ideas!

Tuesday was a very busy day. I worked on more certs, and set up another meeting to discuss more questions that I had, as I begin to make significant progress on the certs and need to make more detailed tweaks. Also, IBM’s websites are very difficult to navigate, so working with that has been very difficult. I sat in on another Sprint meeting in product, where I got to witness again how Agile planning is structured and how efficiently it works. Lastly, and most excitingly, I had a phone interview with Linda Chapman today (the woman Michael Harward put me in contact with). I got to ask her many questions about her parents’ foreign service, where she lived, what she knew of the lifestyle, and what my first steps towards that career should be. It was amazing! It was a short phone call, but I quickly learned so much.

On Wednesday, I began the day by writing thank you notes to Michael and Mechelle in the training center for letting me shadow them. I also followed up with Linda Chapman to thank her for taking the time to speak with me. I also got to sit in on a Marcomm production meeting, where I learned that there are many, MANY, frustrations within the department. They are frustrated by the lack of transparency when projects are being passed along, and frustrated with the absence of a formal system that everyone should adhere to. This meeting was informative because I learned a lot about what not to do when setting up a department—transparency and fluidity are a must. I also received a new project from Dave, the VP, today. He asked me to take a look at the new Fortune 500 list and determine which ones we do not have as named accounts for sales enablement.

Finally, this week I wrote and sent out a performance evaluation. I asked my colleagues to fill it out and return it by Monday, July 18^th. Hopefully the responses are good!