SAP Shoroq in Morocco

This will be my last post, before I will fly to Rabat. Only two days left... from day to day my anticipation and excitement is growing. 😀 Soon I will meet all colleagues from SAP and Pyxera that I have met only via Skype so far.  But I am not only looking forward to all the new people and to all experiences that are waiting ahead. I am also eager to discover more about Morocco, its culture and its people. You can be sure that I will share some of my impressions in the upcoming weeks. As I have already spent my last year's vacation in Morocco, I want to share some pictures with you to make you curious as well and to also raise some anticipation of what is coming soon. Food Tajine Snail Marrakech Djemaa el fna at daylight Djemaa el fna at night Koutoubia Mosque Bahia Palace Mosque al-Mansur Bab Agnaou Jardin Majorelle Countryside Essaouira Kasbah Aïn-Ben-Haddou (known from the movie Gladiator and Game of Thrones)...

Today we had the announcement of our subteam, the assignment to our local client and the introduction of our Scope of Work. I was so excited and could not wait to get more information about our work in Rabat!  For the project work in Morocco the twelve SAP colleagues are split into subteams of three people each. This is my team: Janet Brewer from the USA and Marek Garbos from UK will work together with me. After our first calls over Skype, I am really looking forward to work closely with these two. Together we will support the local client MCISE (Moroccan Center for Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship). MCISE logo They describe themselves as "a not-for-profit dedicated to finding entrepreneurial and innovative solutions to every social challenge in Morocco. It was founded in 2012 by a group of 17 people enthusiastic about social change in Morocco.We believe that supporting social entrepreneurs with system-changing ideas can provide benefits for Morocc...

As part of our preparation for week 3, we had to finalize our team motto. So the twelve of us met online on Friday 8th for a brainstorming session on how our team logo should look like and what we would like to use as our team motto. Our teammate Ivy was so kind to finalize our proposals into our team introduction slide. I don't want keep you from seeing it any longer, so here is the final team motto: Team Motto of team SAP Shoroq I guess, the text stands for itself: As one team we share one dream, mission and passion . That is to "raise together to make an impact: to connect people and improve lives" .  During our assignment, we want to share information, help each other and the client, be open, act respectful, be optimistic and deliver high quality work. For me, the above sounds like a pretty good summary of what the social sabbatical is all about. Let me finish the post with two missing details: The background picture was taken during sunrise ...

You may already have wondered: Why is the blog called "SAP Shoroq in Morocco" and why is he writing about South Africa? Due to some change of plans, our team assignment was changed from Durban, South Africa to Rabat, Morocco. I am a little bit disappointed about this. Reason is that I have never been to South Africa or any southern part of Africa before, so I would have loved to dive into the people and their culture over there. I also spent 3 weeks of vacation in Morocco in 2016, so I already discovered some things, more about it in a later post. But I haven't seen Rabat and the middle to northern part of it, so still a lot to experience.

Yeah! 😀  Today I received the mail from the SAP Social Sabbatical team: My application from May was accepted. I will spend my social sabbatical in Durban, South Africa, over four weeks from October 07th to November 4th. I was awaiting the reply even more as this was my second application after the one in 2015. With that I would like to welcome you on this blog. Join me for the next couple of weeks. I intend to cover some facts about our preparation work before the assignment, our work with the local client during our assignment and also some impressions on the people, the country and its culture. With the confirmation mail, I also received more information about the setup of our assignment. We are assigned as a team of twelve colleagues from the SAP locations in Argentina, Austria, Australia, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Portugal and the USA. Together we will have pre-work sessions in the last six weeks (August 30th - October 4th) before the sabbatical starts in Oc...