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Preparation is key!

As we learned yesterday from Bert van Marwijk preparation is key in performing. Today I met with my contact at a new customer. We talked about the organization, the project and the VLC assignment. We shared some documents for me to study. My contact attended EIM2011 and we talked about the application of some take-aways from yesterday, especially from Toon Abcouwer! When I arrived at the VLC Utrecht office I was in luck that my colleague at the assignment was at the office. We discussed our work and discussed some to-do’s. I started reading some documents for preparation the rest of the day. In between reading I started on actual preparation for a workshop that is planned for next week.

At the end of the day I had a meeting discussing the VLC Advisory Change Management effort. We discussed some theory and methodologies. We talked about the way we can spread the knowledge on this topic within VLC. This inspired me to look at the preparation for my engagement I worked on earlier today: learning starts at the beginning of a project!

For me a big extra is that it is the first time in my working life that I can go to a customer by bike!

PS1: my MacBook Pro battery lasted all day long 🙂

PS2: why do Dell printer find it so hard to print documents from Apple’s 🙁

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My first workday again?!

As 33 year-old of course ;-).

Today was the first day working with my new MacBook Pro. At VLC we have a Pick Your Own policy for laptop’s and finally I made my choice. For the last two years I have been working with a 13 inch MacBook with great pleasure, so I decided to stick with the model and upgrade to the fastest chip and RAM. The battery was great, the first signes of fatigue were at 15:30 after a full recharge! This is a great plus when I am on the road.

In the morning I spend some to with our accountant on the new Advisory unit. All seems very straight forward and it helped I have my own business. During the day I was occupied with a number of opportunities and did some preparation combining our Information Productivity Scan, Infographics and the Strategic Alignment Model.

Today I went to work on my bike again, it takes me 30 minutes one-way. This is a really vitalizing way to start the day and really refreshing after spending the entire day inside an office.

PS: if you missed my posting last friday, you did not! Friday is my day with my 20 month old son. We went to Amsterdam to change tires, did a nap and went for a long walk in the sun!

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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.