Thursday

Again the delay on posting for Thursday the day was just so fully packed I had to write this blog on Friday's airplane ride home.  

Yesterday was a day of further training and configuring.  We got 10 iPhones configured for their specific users and laptops, modems, and cases all recorded in our database.  The wrestle with so many pieces of machinery, each hitting different glitches and slowed by mediocre internet connection, is a battle I will not miss! All I have to say is thank God for the eventual acquisition of the external modems that allowed us to connect to 3G cell networks form the computers!

In the afternoon it was training as usual.  Four return supervisors who had attended training last week but really needed the refresher course joined me for a last navigation, practice and data entry test.  I built online trainings and sent them on their way to begin practicing daily, the encuesta collection method that will soon become their standard. I told them I would be watching their entry work on Salesforce.com even though I would not be in Honduras over the weekend.  The all left with their own iPhones!

After the supervisor departure I was immediately back in it, shifting gears from supervisor training to ejecutor and tecnico thinking.

The tecnicos were on it and were left to their own devices, sent out to collect contacts and GPS marks in the field. all down perfectly as I later discovered when I ran a specialized report!  While they were gone I worked with their ejectors.  I found they had perfectly completed their homework and that when quizzed they were able to recall lessons quickly and navigate the database without problem.  We ran through a last step by step of how to run the reports in the system that will give information specifically related to their jobs. Be it about their tecnicos, upcoming build sites, or GPS locations on recent stove builds.

It was my last full day in Honduras, and I left fairly confident in each of the groups and their abilities to process and add information to the salesforce.com system.  I think that the next week will be the real test to the training and plan is to keep pushing practice on the different groups so they don't forget all the information we put so much effort into teaching.  There are some final modifications to the system that are being worked through but our plan is ejecutor and tecnico pilot group roll out in January! 

A very successful two weeks and a new opportunity for me to learn through action how to successfully train, manage and implement new project roll-out;  I could not have asked for a better team of people to work with.  My time in Honduras also gave me the chance to meet with so many different groups: academics, stove builders, carbon credit verifiers, foundation representatives, and of course Honduran and California based managers.  The most rewarding of all experiences from this trip however had to be my multiple interactions with Tigo employees!

Thanks for following, more updates on the stove project implementation and roll out will certainly come but I am also hoping to profile some other projects and people that have found exciting ways to blend disparate fields like the mixing of Technology and Development work I have talked about here.