3 Months with MCS
Today marks exactly 3 months of my joining MCS. Oh boy...does not time fly when you are too busy...
I feel like I actually need to pause my life for a few days and take a break of this big challenge that I chased so badly...Don't get me wrong, No complaints at all, I just need to get some sleep(with all the afterhours of preparation and administrative tasks a consultant needs to do apart from his normal, customer facing, 8 working hours; I barely get 4 hours of sleep on weekdays). I would like also to take some time to reflect on that past period(I am trying to do a bit of that here on this posting)
So far all my engagements have been partner training and workshops. I have to say this was a very wise decision from my boss. He hit quite a few birds with one stone by doing that. Trainings are considered low risk engagements, so even if I screw up, then the worse that could happen would be a bad feedback from the partner. On the contrary, if those engagements were real projects or Proof of Concept pilots, and things went wrong, then we could loose a deal or even worse...a customer. I need to say also that these engagements had helped me to improve many parts of my myself which I thought needed some work, but never really got real life situations to help on that before joining MCS. For one thing, I am now totally over my stage fright; I can talk to groups of people for days now :) My presentation skills are better also I guess, but most importantly I think, is the ability to become a people's person, to know how to build relationships with everybody, from junior developers to CIOs of companies of different nationalities . For e.g. anyone who has worked in that field will tell you that having a demo fail or a lab not work in front of your students is not an uncommon thing, but one lesson I have learned is that if you have established this personal relationship with the people then basically they will forgive you for that, and you might still actually get good feedback as well :).
As for the travel, unfortunately I missed a couple of role trainings that I was supposed to attend since my work permit was delayed a lot in Jordan, and without that I couldn’t apply for any foreign Visa. However, fortunately the guy in the Cypriot embassy was so nice to give me the visa to Cyprus without requiring that. I have been in Cyprus for the last three weeks delivering trainings to partners here as well. Cyprus is a nice place (I will definitely put a separate posting about this trip, with pics ;) ) but to stay for 4 weeks completely alone is nothing easy at all. I managed to make some friends after the first couple of weeks so at least I don’t eat dinner alone on the weekends now.
I feel like I actually need to pause my life for a few days and take a break of this big challenge that I chased so badly...Don't get me wrong, No complaints at all, I just need to get some sleep(with all the afterhours of preparation and administrative tasks a consultant needs to do apart from his normal, customer facing, 8 working hours; I barely get 4 hours of sleep on weekdays). I would like also to take some time to reflect on that past period(I am trying to do a bit of that here on this posting)
So far all my engagements have been partner training and workshops. I have to say this was a very wise decision from my boss. He hit quite a few birds with one stone by doing that. Trainings are considered low risk engagements, so even if I screw up, then the worse that could happen would be a bad feedback from the partner. On the contrary, if those engagements were real projects or Proof of Concept pilots, and things went wrong, then we could loose a deal or even worse...a customer. I need to say also that these engagements had helped me to improve many parts of my myself which I thought needed some work, but never really got real life situations to help on that before joining MCS. For one thing, I am now totally over my stage fright; I can talk to groups of people for days now :) My presentation skills are better also I guess, but most importantly I think, is the ability to become a people's person, to know how to build relationships with everybody, from junior developers to CIOs of companies of different nationalities . For e.g. anyone who has worked in that field will tell you that having a demo fail or a lab not work in front of your students is not an uncommon thing, but one lesson I have learned is that if you have established this personal relationship with the people then basically they will forgive you for that, and you might still actually get good feedback as well :).
As for the travel, unfortunately I missed a couple of role trainings that I was supposed to attend since my work permit was delayed a lot in Jordan, and without that I couldn’t apply for any foreign Visa. However, fortunately the guy in the Cypriot embassy was so nice to give me the visa to Cyprus without requiring that. I have been in Cyprus for the last three weeks delivering trainings to partners here as well. Cyprus is a nice place (I will definitely put a separate posting about this trip, with pics ;) ) but to stay for 4 weeks completely alone is nothing easy at all. I managed to make some friends after the first couple of weeks so at least I don’t eat dinner alone on the weekends now.
posted by Bassem at
9:19 AM
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