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High Mobility Working

Today my work took me to four different places. First up was the VLC office in Utrecht. For me this is ‘home’ and a great place to meet coworkers. After some emailing and phone calls I went to our VLC office in Amsterdam for a quick meeting with the delivery manager for my project. This was unexpected for him as we planned to have a conference call. But for me it was on the way to my next appointment. Meetings in person always seem to be more productive. For this meeting this surely was the point as we could do some pre-evaluation stuff.

After that I went back on the road to meetup and lunch with a New World of Work Friend. We discussed a new initiative I am working and got some valuable feedback and ideas. We had not spoken since my move to VLC and until now we had not had the chance to talk about his work more in depth so we talked about our companies and the work we are doing.

My last stop was at Qlikview where we had a very productive problem solving session for one of our customers. We really were hitting the right vibe and we came up with some new fixes and ideas!

For me this was a high mobility workday where I worked on four locations. My documents, email and schedules are 100% in the cloud. This is great but requires access to the cloud to work 😉

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Interaction means better ideas faster?

Today I had a few discussions with coworkers on various matters. All were needed and essential to straighten out my own ideas and take these ideas to the next level. The morning started with a discussion about my new blogging impulse. Clearly I am setting some expectations about frequency but more importantly on the results of my work. For me the most important element is a moment to let go of the day and ensure more focus on a longer timescale.

Next I called a few coworkers to discuss a new idea. I will disclose this idea later on. Obviously I needed to explain my idea but I was keen not to tell to much. I did not want to set to many boundaries for this idea. Discussing the idea briefly a few times made it clearer to me as well. And I got some other ideas to for free!

After lunch I had a teammeeting onsite with a customer. When the meeting was finished we returned to the office and discussed our ideas with a coworker. In this discussion he managed to break out of our ‘groupthink’ and get some fresh and good ideas on the table. Now we can act on these ideas and get back on track faster!

My 2% learning curve of today would be to get someone with fresh ears and brains in a 15 minute ‘power’ meeting more regularly to talk and get better results in less time.

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First Day of the Month: Time to Get Kicking!

I started the day with a bike ride to the office, 30 minutes of energy and thoughts. When I arrived I took some time to sum up my tasks for today. I manage my to-do-list in Rememberthemilk, a great service that enables syncing between web and my iphone. When I was finished, I started with my to-do’s. During the day I came across a small number of to-do’s I missed earlier in the morning. And I had to postpone a number of batched to-do’s to tomorrow. Is there a way to plan to-do’s for one day more exact to prevent the loss of time?

A larger batch of to-do’s was about VLC Advisory, a new business unit at VLC that will start on the first of June. I planned our next internal meeting that will focus on 360 degrees feedback & personal BSC’s and the followup on our big event on May 11th, EIM2011! To give more direction on the 360 feedback & BSC’s we finished a document on profiles for our work. I spent some time on budgets and financial reporting for the new business unit. We want to be as transparant as possible to give the employees in the new unit a complete overview on performance.

At the end of the day there was a teammeeting to discuss our work finishing a project in the next weeks. For me the best part of the meeting as project manager was that my team was thinking about the plan for the next week themselves. Within 30 minutes everybody agreed on our approach and we ended the meeting.

Tomorrow I need to spend some time on Sales and Marketing and on Project Management for one of our clients. For this client we are setting up a daily workflow to crunch a very large amount of webdata. This project is a technical implementation of Hadoop, Pentaho and Qlikview. Sales and Marketing will focus on the introduction strategy and a number of concrete leads for one of our main products, the Information Productivity Scan.