Working at the office of MV Foundation @ Narayan Appartments, West Maredpally, Hyderabad

Today it’s Saturday June 20th. Yes, it’s Saturday. People at MV Foundation tend to work on Saturday. Because we still got a lot of work to do, we thought that it is even very convenient that MV Foundation’s head office is also open on Saturday. The last days, since our visits to several schools and camps we have been spending our days at the head office of MV Foundation.

Lieke was performing interviews for her own project with several people form MV Foundation like Naren, Mahender and Venkat. And Gerrit and Vincent continued with their issues on CMS project: adapting necessary changes in the use cases, adding code, rebuilding the database and helping colleagues in the Netherlands and India with occurred developing issues.

First we want to tell you about a regular day at the MV Foundation head office. The day starts between 10 am and 10.30 am. It depends on the moment the first person arrives with keys of the office. Once the office doors are open everyone drops in after another. The office isn’t as fancy as we’re used to at Logica. MV Foundation has two apartments at the second floor in an apartment complex. Between those two apartments they created an opening, so the head office is actually a huge apartment with in total eight rooms, excluded the kitchen and bathroom. There are no doors in the office, but instead of doors there are some kind of curtains. The furniture also isn’t what we’re used to. If you are very picky on Arbo-things, then you’d better not work at the head office of MV Foundation. There are a lot of cabinets with a lot of paperwork in it. All that paperwork isn’t archived very neat, but somehow all the people know exactly where they kind find a particular document or book. During a regular day about 20 people are working here, man and women. There’s a maid, who cleans the floor, doing the dishes, etc. And there’s also a ‘lilliputter’ who’s tall enough to put our chai next to us on our table. He serves as chai two times a day: in the morning and in the afternoon. The day ends normally at 6 pm. For us it would be better if the working day lasts a little longer. So the last MVF employee standing stays till around 7 pm and then he makes clear that he wants to leave in 10 minutes.
We’ve got the idea that the people here maybe aren’t working as hard as people in the Netherlands normally do, but somehow they have more fun in doing their job compared to the people in the Netherlands. The MVF workers doing their job ‘op z’n elf-een-dertigst’. The people from MV Foundation are very devoted regarding the goals MV Foundation wants to achieve.

The equipment at MV Foundation also isn’t what we’re used to. It’s most likely that our laptops were on top the best computers at the office. There is a wireless internet connection, but it hasn’t that quality and speed that we do have at our Logica offices or at home. Every now and then the wireless connection is gone. Not a big very big problem, except the moments that we’re checking our code in or out. Indian people aren’t materialists. Somehow everyone does have a fancy cell phone. It is said that a cell phone in India is a sort of status symbol.

Now we shall write down some things on how we’re doing our work at the MV Foundation head office and how we’re in contact with our Indian and Dutch colleagues. It’s hard to use our own cell phones, because the rates to make and receive calls are very high. We’re still Dutch, aren’t we? So that’s why we use our Logica-mail, but mostly we use Office Communicator. Actually it’s almost like communication with our project colleagues when we were in the Netherlands. The big difference here is that the internet connection isn’t very stable. Another problem is that in India power cut offs occur every now and then and they are not announced. It’s quite hard to deal with power cut offs especially when you’re battery starts to reaching the 0%. During a power cut off only necessary equipment will be up and running and they use old car batteries for that.

We discuss a lot with the people at MV Foundation. Whenever there’s a question, we can disturb them. When they’re busy they ask for five minutes of our patience. Mostly that will do. Their knowledge of IT isn’t actually what we expected. We were told that they can handle Word and Excel, but it’s hard to explain the things that Gerrit and Vincent are doing. The MVF-people aren’t also that very smart in explaining things regarding to functionalities or facilities regarding the Child Monitoring System. Especially when you start talking in terms like categories, subcategories and relationships between items. Using pen and paper helps a lot, but that still doesn’t make the things fully clear to the MVF people. So it takes a lot of time and patience to clarify things.

The longer we’re here the more we’re running out of time. Especially last Friday we’ve been talking a lot with Ruud en Geert Jan in the Netherlands and with Animesh and Ashok in Bangalore, because we definitely want to show to the people of MV Foundation a solid prototype of the Child Monitoring System. We’ve asked Arvind to pick a time for this Monday to arrange a meeting. He said fifteen to twenty people will attend the presentation of the CMS prototype. After our presentation we can discuss on some topics regarding the Child Monitoring System.
Tomorrow it’s Sunday. The office will be closed, so that creates possibilities for the three of us to exploit some not work related things. Probably we’ll be outside, since the temperature is still outstanding since we got here.

More about our day off and our CMS prototype presentation in one of our next posts.