Just another day at the office.

The fun thing about a CSC assignment is that you’re given a project that would normally take 4-6 months even and you squeeze it into 4 weeks. It’s interesting what happens when you squash time for introductions, research, analysis, relationship building and presenting a final deliverable into such a tight frame.

This is week 2 at IZTEKGEB where our workdays comprise of Gap Analysis, SWOT Analysis and other fancy management techniques. Of course there’s work to be taken home, we have tons of documents to read and review, websites to research and notes to compare.

We’ve spent the week meeting with a number of companies at the Technopark; and understanding their views and challenges on entrepreneurship, innovation and research. They’ve shared stories about the products they work on and ideas they’ve come up with.  It’s been a very enlightening experience.

There’s always time for lunch (This is Turkey; where we stop and enjoy the moment; so no take out and eat at my desk happens here). We walk down to the cafeteria shared with the Technopark and sit outdoors and enjoy lunch.

Storming, norming and forming! 

Yes, as with any team put together; the group also goes through this development model. We spend a lot of time in our subteams thrashing out ideas and we depend on each other’s experiences to develop an end to end model. Of course, unconventional assignments do require some unconventional working styles as we've seen quite a bit! 

Time to look out of the window… The campus overlooks the seaside village of Gulbache; with its scenic location and wide open spaces, I can see why companies in the research and development space have time to think out of the box.

And so we get through our days over multiple cups of Chai, Turkish Coffee and Nescafe (süt ve şeker ile); I've even learnt to ask for milk and sugar added.

Once we're done with work, we head out for the long drive home and look forward to sitting out on the hotel porch catching up over drinks and conversation.