Tales about Aviation, Coaching, Farming, Software Development

Highlights of 2013

I started my new work life in Germany in January by taking on a role as Scrum Master at a retail company. I recreated my role to become more a Value Stream Improvement Coach across departments in order to bring people along the value chain together and thus improve it. As part of that I also reduced my physical presence to 2 days/week in order to permit my coachees to develop independence.

That freed up some time to pursue becoming a pilot again which I achieved on April 1st when I passed the practical test. In June I started to think about how I could put this regained ability to good use to develop my business and wrote about business travel with light aircraft and also started a separate set of special pages about the topic.

September provided an opportunity to try that out. With my family I tried to travel in a rented Cirrus SR20 from Egelsbach, Germany, to Bukarest, Romania to the ALE2013 conference. Our journey took us from Germany to the Czech Republic, over Slovakia to Hungary and then into Romania. We never arrived there because of bad weather, there was a thunderstorm blocking our way, but I could tell how real options can be used in real life. On the way back to went through Austria to see a portion of the Alps. Although I didn’t made it to the conference I could still reflect a bit on the risks and side effects of agile coaching. Plus, I wrote about the development of capabilities using my quest of creating a unique advantage for my business as an example.

As being limited to flying only in good weather VFR isn’t really creating an advantage for my business I began in October training for the instrument rating.

In December I shared my thoughts about changing people’s mindset with kanban.

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