Personal Development, No Plan

At the start of this year I (re)found work at a foundation in my beautiful home country. And as an employee in the Netherlands there's almost no escape from the compulsory ritual that's called 'persoonlijk ontwikkel plan' (personal development plan) or 'POP'. In such a plan employer and employee agree on targets and intentions for the next working year. Hammered in stone these targets are (depending on company, boss and/or HR department) used to assess the contribution toward the company's and your private goals...

Anyways, in this case the writing of my development plan was a process of filling in a excel sheet with a not entirely transparent structure, in which 'smart'goals were given 'weights' (in percentages) that resulted some work spaces and lots of excel scripts later in a very objective judgment of yours truly. Since I stepped in a few weeks after the deadline for filling in the excel, one of my first tasks was to fill in all categories satisfactory.

So I started out, sending in 'alpha' and 'beta' releases of my plan to my boss, who then returned my versions full of his remarks. This process repeated it self for quite some incarnations of my plan until it turned out all of a sudden to be 'ok'. During this workflow no goal, intention or other fiction was left untouched, except for one item, counting for one (1) percent of my personal development: Painting Waffen SS infantry for Flames of War. Being approved by my manager and HR department, I faced this challenge!

Having painted a Flames of War Czech-Russian tank army, I had become familiar with the practice of painting 15mm scale miniatures. The SS panzergrenadiers were however quite different: Instead of some tanks there were nearly 200 miniature men to be painted...
So actually it was a blessing in disguise that I managed to sneak in a little (bad) joke in my 'POP'. The pressure was on and I finished just in time!!

Let me know what you think of the paint job!

Regards and a happy wargaming filled 2014!