Our US team also grew in size. Nimat joined the team full-time early in the year. She has taken on the “Chief People Officer” role among many others. Scott formally joined our board as an Advisor in the middle of the year.
We participated at NTEN conference in DC. There we met Bill from Endanger Health. With Bill's encouragement, we conceived the idea of organizing a similar conference in Bangladesh. We (Nimat and Syed) separately visited our Bangladesh team in August and November. The trips were tiring but fruitful. We got many things done that could not be done remotely. It was nice to see how quickly our young Bangladesh team bonded together. Nimat during her trip in November made some progress on organizing an NTEN conference in Bangladesh next year.
See (in the picture below) Nimat is sharing a "word of wisdom" with the team at the opening ceremony of our new office during her visit in November:
A word of wisdom from our "Chief People Officer"
Who knew setting up a business in Bangladesh would be challenging and time consuming. We started the process in March. We kept hitting walls. Every time we found ourselves at a dead-end, we regrouped and pursued in a different way. Finally, we got the papers done, thanks to Mr. Alim, Mr. Kamal, and Mr. Babul for their help. What a relief.
We worked on fun projects for our clients through out the year. To be honest, we did not always manage our clients' expectations well. But we learned from our mistakes, and improved upon our approach and processes. We also started a few internal projects. You will hear about these projects from us soon. We not only worked hard, we had fun as a team. Mahfuz is our current top scorer in bowling. Rabbi you need to make a come-back next year. It seems Fuad is going to be our "Ironman of the Year." There still are a few days left; knock on wood. We did our first year-end performance review of our team. It is a new concept for our Bangladesh team, but it was well accepted. We will continue to tweak the process in the coming years.
2007 was also significant at a personal level for our team. Fuad and Sohan got married. Fuad and Rabbi got promoted to Software Engineer at mid-year. Sohan got promoted to Senior Software Engineer at year-end. Several of our members (Sohan, Rubaiat, Titu, Mahfuz, Ratul, Rashed) graduated from school. Congratulations to all of you.
The year is ending on a good note. We have signed up a new client. We are ready for a new year 2008!
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