last two weeks. The first week, Teena and Suresh taught the LA Times crew about our site specific applications. We did not have Citrix (the means by which IBM will access the Tribune network) for the first week. A lot of emails and hard work on both sides of the world got that functioning properly by the next Monday. They did a good job of explaining what we do without being able to show the 
applications or what happens. LAT has/had 12 people on their team. I learned all their names and then David left. He and John had the easiest names to remember for some strange reason. The pictures here are of Teena and Suresh teaching. Chandon is sitting pensively. He is the project 
manager on the IBM side. We were beginning to make him sick at this point. He had to go back to New Delhi to recover. I'm afraid it was my fault. He was my rock for the first couple of weeks. Whenever I had problems I would call him and shove the phone at the person who was causing my problem. He says I didn't make him sick, but I find that hard to believe.The students were tested at the end of the week. Suresh and Teena wrote an excellent quiz and all must have passed, because they are all still here (except for David.)
On the second week, 
we were joined by a mere 40 more students. Well, maybe slightly less. After a brief introduction to Tribune and newspaper in general, the classes were divided in two, in two different training rooms. We now have the other traveling teams from IBM here. Most teach some of the lessons. For most of the week, Panaki and Rishi taught basic hardware and MS Office (including Outlook.) The folks have a lot of documentation to rely on, but what really pleased me was the class exercises. We had Panaki and Suresh working together in our classroom. They would divide the group into teams. Each team came up with a question that a user would ask. It was the task of the other team to ask good questions and resolve the issue. At one point, Suresh wrote down all the questions they asked and pointed out why some were way off, why some could have been better and why some helped resolve the issue. This was perfect. Knowing how a computer or Outlook works is one thing, but asking the questions that will get to the true issue quickly and resolving the problem quickly is key. You can almost see this begin to make sense to the team.
we were joined by a mere 40 more students. Well, maybe slightly less. After a brief introduction to Tribune and newspaper in general, the classes were divided in two, in two different training rooms. We now have the other traveling teams from IBM here. Most teach some of the lessons. For most of the week, Panaki and Rishi taught basic hardware and MS Office (including Outlook.) The folks have a lot of documentation to rely on, but what really pleased me was the class exercises. We had Panaki and Suresh working together in our classroom. They would divide the group into teams. Each team came up with a question that a user would ask. It was the task of the other team to ask good questions and resolve the issue. At one point, Suresh wrote down all the questions they asked and pointed out why some were way off, why some could have been better and why some helped resolve the issue. This was perfect. Knowing how a computer or Outlook works is one thing, but asking the questions that will get to the true issue quickly and resolving the problem quickly is key. You can almost see this begin to make sense to the team.Here are the folks in our room in their native costumes. I dressed as a native Californian. I don't think that's what they were expecting.
No comments:
Post a Comment