My Head is Spinning!!!

Yesterday we started work with our clients.

The day started with all the clients

• Ural IT Cluster
• Finance Department, Ekaterinburg City Administration
• Ekaterinburg Congress Bureau
• Ural Federal University

and the IBM team getting together.  We all introduced ourselves which was an interesting experience as we had to work through an interpreter and then each of the client organisations introduced themselves.  There were about 30 people in the room

After the group meeting we met with our individual clients. I am working with Kuldeep from India and we are working on a project to create a marketing strategy for the Ural IT Cluster.

After briefly meeting with Max CEO and Dima, Development Director of the IT Cluster, Max drove us to the offices of Naumen where we met Andrey their CEO.  Naumen is a one of the founding member of the Ural IT Cluster.  They have just entered the AP market under the name of Noda and Andrey had only just returned from Asia where had attended a Call Centre Conference in Singapore and met some people from the A/NZ Bank Calls Centre in New Zealand.  Naumen are providing Kuldeep and I with office space during our stay in Ekaterinburg.  We also met and spent about an hour with the CFO learning more about their business.

Max and Dima also also have their own businesses in Ekaterinburg and the work that they do with the Ural IT Cluster is because they are passionate becoming  a hub for the IT Industry not just in Russia but globally.

In the afternoon we met a number of other people

• Max (another one) who is the only employee of the Ural IT Cluster.  Max will be setting up meetings for us, etc and be our primary point of contact whilst we are in Ekaterinburg.    Max knew more about Wellington's Mayoral Elections than I do!!!   I learned from Max that  Jack Yan is running for Mayor.  Max, who is still a student,  has a very keen interest in world politics - he certainly must have to know about Council elections in Wellington :-)

•  Lera who is our translator whilst we are working with the Ural IT Cluster.  She is also a student - studying History.

• Julia who owns a company called IT People and is working with the Cluster to try and lift the profile of the IT profession in Ekaterinburg by setting up training, conferences, etc.  She also does IT recruitment.  

•  Daniil who is CEO of an IT newspaper - IT-Eburg.com

The view from Julia's office was spectaculor

We learned so much from our meetings  - I felt like a sponge taking in so much information.  It is so exciting to be working with clients face to face and so nice to be working in an area which is completely new but where I can see how my skills can add value - hopefully!!!

We got back to the hotel about 6.00 p.m. and everyone was very excited about their day and like me overloaded with information, ideas, etc.

We headed to a restaurant called the Saray Club for dinner.  We thought it was Indian but it turned out to me Turkish/Middle Eastern and the food was superb.  Even the vegetarians in our team found good food to eat and in fact the vegetarian tagine looked the best of all the dishes.

On the way back to the hotel (about 9.30 p.m. and still like the middle of the day) I noticed that not only did Ekaterinburg have trolley buses but they had red trolley buses - reminded me of Wellington prior to our now black and yellow buses