Gold for Experts, W03
This week, Atos’ “Gold for Experts” intake three returned to Cambridge. It’s our final week of the program in which we’re due to present our projects to senior management (the CxO’s we’ve been targeting during the program). For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, you can look at my other blogs in this series: here, here, here and here.
The last few months have been hard work. Our team has been working hard to give the best possible presentation next Friday. Today we spent the evening dotting the i’s, caring about font sizes, graph colours for the colour blind and other things that probably no one will notice. But that all didn’t matter, ’cause it was fun. It’s too soon to look back already, but the program has definitely been fun. And hard work, but I think I already said that.
We’re back to the nice views, this time from the tower bars’ sunroof.
As with the previous weeks, we arrived on Sunday. I had an extra tough time because my dad decided that the Saturday evening before my flight was the perfect night to celebrate his 65th birthday. It was a good party, but I was glad to be able to catch three hours of additional sleep once I got to the hotel in Cambridge. Luckily, the Sunday program was kept light for a change, a bit better than the previous ones which already featured a full length session.
And now we’re already two full days in, learning about things like valuing projects, working in an agile way, architectures and much more. There was a cool session about the DISC method by colleague Mischa van Oijen whom I already knew because he sometimes visits our Eindhoven office and works closely with another colleague I know well. +1 For my established network there I guess. Anyway, according to the DISC method he taught us about I’m a “D” which stands for “Dominant”. My team agreed on that and so they’ve been calling me the “D” for the rest of the day. Fun times.
Hugo displaying his teams resources & competences.
I’ve decided not to into all of the individual topics for these blog posts, as the previous posts hopefully gave you an idea of what the goal is here. I must also say that we’re beginning to get to the point where things are starting to repeat themselves as we see examples from the first two weeks returning in the slidedecks. Not that that’s a bad thing, it’s a nice way to sort of recap and complete the circle. Everything feels like we’re closing in on the end here, which is getting me into reflective mode.
One of our tutors, Judith, showed us a picture of a toolbox on Monday. This was about being able to ask the right questions, but I want to use the picture as another analogy. The program has given us a range of tools (methods, frameworks) which you can use to transform a business. The ultimate goal is to change your business so it adapts to the market it’s in (or adapts the market it’s in) and help you maximize the potential of the company. Of course, tools are useless without the opportunity to use them. So that’s one of the things that I’m curious about and didn’t really get a good answer to yet. Cause after the program ends, it’s back to normal day-to-day business again and I’m not sure whether those tools will come in handy in my current position.
Judith her toolbox
So maybe I need to change positions, maybe the company should give me the opportunity to let me change things next to my normal job. Not sure. So that’s definitely one of the things I’ll be thinking about in the next few months, trying to figure out what I now can / want to do with all of this new stuff I’ve learned.
Anyways. Time to hit the bed and rest. We’re going punting (not even sure that’s spelled correctly) tomorrow and you’re supposed to be able to make some nice pictures there. So watch out for another blog post with beautiful pictures!
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