A New Year: Setting Goals with the Nepal Team

This week, our office has been filled to the brim with enthusiasm and energy as we prepare for the upcoming year-end events. After a successful and rewarding year in 2012, we’re excited for 2013 and optimistic about what the New Year has in store for us.

Each year Avionté holds a companywide meeting to review what we accomplished the previous year and what each department’s goal will be for coming year. We’ve designated Friday as the day for this meeting in the U.S. office. Many of our employees who typically work out-of-office have flown in for the meeting and for our year-end party – and we’re enjoying having them here with us and catching up with each of them face-to-face! Our Sr. Business and Software Analyst Kevin Cunningham flew in from New York on Tuesday, while Angela Pitts and Matt Gallagher out of our sales department are joining us as well.

Our Nepal staff is a critical part of the team, but the time difference makes it difficult for them to join our regular meeting without staying awake from midnight until five a.m.! So, on Tuesday night, the partners and managers gathered around their computers for some video conferencing from 10 p.m. until midnight on Tuesday evening. The U.S. team walked the Nepal team through an overview of our meeting to come and listened as the Nepal Management team presented their goals for 2013.

The Nepal team has some exciting and ambitious goals set for 2013. They also have some amazing talent on that side of the world and we have no doubt that they can make it all happen! Here are a few of the goals the team presented to our U.S. partner/management team during the meeting:

• Getting the right people in the right place. They are all talented, but finding where people really shine and putting them in a position to succeed will make the entire team more cohesive.
• Reduction of Conversion time by 30%. Conversion is one of the biggest challenges and greatest unknowns in any implementation. Streamlining this is a big challenge, but the team is taking great strides to improve steps and reduce overall time to completion.
• Continued development for automated testing procedures.
• Increase processes and overall communication between the Nepal and U.S. teams. Recently, some of our staff visited Nepal to begin working on this goal. You can read about our Director of Operations Laura Schmitz’s first weekend in Nepal here.
• Improvements to the upgrade process and setups.
• E-docs and reporting improvements on process, efficiency and quality along with a more formalized testing and knowledge-sharing procedure.
• Formalized HR policies, handbook, work logs and training programs.

Following the meeting, the U.S. team went straight to bed (we think) and the Nepal team went out for a group lunch to celebrate a successful 2012. Here are some pictures of our dedicated Nepal team at lunch:

We’d like to say thank you to the entire Nepal team for all of your hard work. We are looking forward to another great year in 2013!