Tuesday, 26.2. – Rolling it up

A busy ‚Home Office‘ day. In the morning, Felix received printouts from Geoffrey for two chapters of the book he will need for his lecture and was busy preparing his first session that is scheduled for tomorrow. I draft a terms of reference (TOR) document for the banking cooperation project, aiming at documenting and agreeing the project layout, its objectives, strategy and stakeholder structure.

While working on the TOR, Oliver Schmidt calls me and asks me to give a further lecture on my Product Management and Organisation piece to GIZ’s Financial System Development (FSD) Group on an occasion that will tentatively be scheduled for 13^th of March in Kampala. Since Product Management seems to become a ‘trending topic’ during our stay in Uganda, I see the need to further perfect my presentation and include thoughts we had put together in the context of a DB-internal initiative on the self-conception of Product Management I had worked on some time ago for our Senior Management with a team of three other Product Managers. Thanks to Giovanna, our hero of knowledge-management in the Frankfurt Office, I had the presentation I was looking for in my mailbox shortly after I called her in the office.

Today we also received the official alert from the German embassy in Uganda on the upcoming elections in Kenya and potential effects on Uganda. So far, we do not expect that our plans will be impacted, however certainly will keep an eye on the further development in order to avoid any risk exposure.

Since the date for the kick-off in Kampala has now been scheduled (Thursday, 14. March), we have also booked our accommodation for the second week of March, so that we can use the time between Monday and Wednesday to personally link up with local Banks before the event and ensure their attendance and commitment.

Before closing the day, we have a follow-up call with Alexander from the CSR team in DB Frankfurt in order to discuss administrational aspects of the project as well as the status and progress made so far.

For dinner, we meet up with Oliver & Family, Felix (#2) and Philipp from GIZ and ride up to Kluge’s Guest Farm, a beautiful venue up in the mountains run by Stefan Kluge, a German ex-pat from Bonn, working and living for 34 (!) years in Central Africa. After a delicious barbecue and a serious tour through Stefan’s bar, we ride home to Fort Portal on a 10km dirt road that still offers much room for improvement.