My Team's Project

The IBM Team's client is the City of Lublin, Poland.  A very interesting city, with a long and storied history, at a dynamic time, with Poland joining the European Union just 11 short years ago in 2003. So much history my simple blog won't come close to capturing even a single dimension of all of the history here.  Lublin, a city that has reshaped itself so many times over the course of history, even served as the temporary capital of Poland in 1944, until Warsaw was liberated by the Russian army in 1945 (Jewish Virtual Library ).  This picture below, from a wall inside the Lublin City Hall helps to put this in perspective... almost 50 years ago the city celebrated its 650th anniversary...WOW 700 years!!

Ok, I have made my case, you need to read more about Lublin to understand the deep history here.  And anyone who is considering a trip to Europe, needs to seriously consider making Poland, and specifically Lublin, a stop along the way, or maybe even the destination.

The IBM Team is working with a specific department within the City, the Department of Strategy and Investor Services (DSIS).  The larger IBM Team is featured on the City's website here. You may recall from an earlier blog post that CSC Poland 1 team actually consists of four teams.  Two of the four teams are attached at the hip to help the City mature the development of its Open Data Strategy (thats my side of the team), and their Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are in place to monitor the Lublin Development Strategy for 2013-2020. Below is the IBM team pictured with the client:

Week one was an intense week. Anyone who has started a new project, or a new job knows there is a lot of learning in the beginning.  Meeting new people, understanding the work, how to work, where things are, how people like to work, and how they don't like to work, etc., etc., etc..  Those dynamics are in play not only on the client side but also within my IBM team as well.  That's the joy and fun of being a Consultant.

But you also need to remember that the smaller IBM Team that I am working on for these four short weeks, is a team of 6 professionals in total from 5 different countries (Canada, China, India, Singapore, and the US).  That is the awesome experience of the CSC Program.