IBM CSC and The Third Affiliated Hospital
It’s been an exciting first week in Beijing. The IBM China 42 Corporate Service Corps (CSC) team had the offical kickoff on Monday and since then my sub team and I have been working from the top floor of the Beijing University of Chinese Medicine Third Affiliated Hospital. The hospital is a three-level Chinese and Western medicine hospital integrating medical treatment, teaching, scientific research, prevention, health care and rehabilitation. Xu Feng, the Vice President of the Third Affiliated Hospital and our project sponsor, welcomed us and introduced us to some incredible doctors, nurses, and staff so far.
What we’ll be doing >>
The IBMers in Beijing for this CSC Deployment are all working with clients whose mission is to help the elderly with care-giving to assisted living. While The Third Affiliated Hospital welcomes patients of all ages, a large portion of the patients are 65-plus. We are partnering with the hospital to impact the elderly patient experience from the moment they are in need of a service, to the consultation and treatment plan. We are also providing management training to the leadership at the hospital, focusing on soft skills and communication. Lastly, we are developing an elevated strategy for their marketing and PR — to help increase awareness among the elderly about the services that the hospital provides as well as some preventative care that can help all citizens stay healthy.
The hospital released an official statement on their website (which many of you will need to translate within the Google Chrome browser to read) about the work we are doing with them. I can’t wait to see the impact we’ll have!
The team >>
I am on a team with three awesome IBMers from around the world to deliver this project. Krishnan is from India and is an expert executive coach and trainer, Angelo is from Italy (working in Poland) and is a master at security and client relationships, and lastly Chris is American (living in Australia) and is a rockstar sales and delivery executive. The four of us together will take our experience and differentiated skills to build a true cross-functional team! Our team also has project assistants. They are eager students who were selected to help us through this experience. Christine, Ada and Vivian have been such an INCREDIBLE asset to our team thus far and I am excited to see what else we can learn from each other!
How we’ll be working >>
As a consultant I am familiar with adapting to new teams, working under intense timelines, and dealing with ambiguity … A lot of this has been and will be put to test throughout this experience. All CSC teams are tasked to deliver to a client that doesn’t necessarily speak your language…while living in a foreign country, with a team from all different backgrounds and cultures. Our team realized very quickly we were all visual communicators — so we went straight to paper and stickies to get out our thoughts and ideas! We started with a Social Contract, which is one of my favorite Agile practices — since it really gives everyone on the team a chance to share what they believe will make the team powerful. At the end we all signed the contract, to make sure we keep each other accountable.
We also decided we needed a team logo (because why not!). I will go into more detail on that next time. Then, we created a “Wall of Work” to help us visualize what we have to get done daily and a “Parking Lot” to make sure we remember all the ideas that come up in conversations throughout the day. We are using a fusion of IBM Design Thinking, Agile, and whatever else we can to make sure we are collaborating and delivering.
Before heading to karaoke Friday night we closed out the week with a retrospective, which was all about what worked well and what we want to do better next week. It was amazing to hear and see the progress we made in just ONE week in Beijing. I have already learned so much about my working style, my communication style and my leadership style this week — I can tell I will be a better person and consultant after this experience. Until next time…
