A lot of stuff...

But so far a bit quiet on the blogging front.
Finishing my first assignment, a Lean Six Sigma training and a couple of very nice weekends...


At ING I finished my assignment at the TANGO program (turning Postbank and ING Bank into ING) and the Cost Containment program (due to the financial mess the world seems to be in). All in all it went very well, I got a good evaluation and found another assignment I am very much looking forward to (more about that sometime soon). In these past 6 months I feel I learned a lot, but at the same time realize that the road is still long...

Last week I spent at the ING Business School for a Greenbelt training (Lean & Six Sigma combined). It was a great week! With 14 trainees we picked a couple of processes and used them to practice our newly acquired skills.

Two weekends ago I also praticipated in a Squash tournament organized by Accenture. At the Frans Otten stadium in Amsterdam about 40 people gathered to play some squash. It had been quite a while since I played last and after 5 games all my energy was gone... the days after my body hurt soooo bad ;-) But the day itself was great and my thanks to Accenture for organizing this fun event.


In the other weekends Shosh and I celebrated my grandma's 75th birthday, spent an evening in Amsterdam, dug out a couple of trees in my sister's backyard and went on a nice cycling trip (after which we rewarded ourselves with a couple of Belgian beers and a piece of vlaai).

And just one and a half week and it's time for the best day of the year: Queens Day!!!
Rodney... you should totally join us and forget about boring Berlin ;-)

De groeten,
Ruudje

Ruud the Builder

Or maybe better: the demolisher...

For the past few weeks I spent at least one day of each weekend to help my dad to strip the bathroom. Not just the furniture but everything had to come out. The reason is simple: my parents are redoing parts of the house. And this is how I looked week after week after a couple of hours of manual labor...
At work everything is going fine. Of course sometimes it is hard dealing with all the negative publicity (which I often do not agree with), but these challenging times also offer many opportunities. I have to decide which assigment I will be doing for the next 5 months and will have the evaluation of my current assignment coming Monday (pretty exciting...)! And the week after Easter I am going to do a Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt training at our Business School. Looking forward to that, because the method seems to be very efficient and fun to apply.

For now, I am enjoying the long days and the sun and making plans for how to spend my weekends best!

Mazzel,
Ruudje