Weeknotes

This week as been a week of trying to find balance between different job roles, between different needs and objectives and been work and home. Not sure I got it all right and it was stressful, but I enjoyed it. 🏎️ - Project-R2 continues at it’s usual pace. I enjoy playing in the big leagues but sometimes it feels like being two children on each others shoulders inside a trench coat. This week’s focus was on planning 2027. Looking at all the projects, what priority, what engineers and skills will be required and where we’ll need to hire to cope. It’s actually pretty exciting when you take a few minutes to stand back and look at it - the trick is to have that few minutes. ...

This week was crunch week. Cut-over for Project-R, really, enough said. Too many hours worked, I’m now off to sleep and try to enjoy the weekend. 🏎️ - Project-R2 cut-over started the week with a big bang. The day started with a Team’s call at 04:00 and continued until 22:00, yeah 18-hour day. Well, that sounds like a disaster, but it actually wasn’t, it was very smooth and the customer really appreciated how well prepared we were. It was a long day simply because there was a lot of to do. This was a dedicated team of over 100 Claranet staff operating throughout the day to take over day-to-day operations from the incumbent provider and start making their way through the backlog of tickets to hand over. No small ask and we were all extremely tired by the end of the day but a job well done. ...

Count down to d-day of Project-R, and lots of time on HR activities makes this a week that blends anxiety and excitement in equal measure. 🏎️ - Project-R2 - with the cut-over of this project into full operations, this week was all the final preparations; runbooks, dashboards, calming anxious team members. 🛑 - This week also included starting some redundancy consultations. An unfortunate part of any acquisition but also a semi-regular part of Claranet’s evolution and growth. It’s never pleasant for anyone involved, but I find myself unfortunately tipping over the edge into disconnection as the process is now so well known to me I can engage with it like a presentation I have delivered too many times before. ...

This week was a fast-paced, somewhat stressful week, much of which is a roll-over from work of previous weeks - so it’s a short update this week. 🏎️ - Project-R2 continues at high speed, with the next batch of projects landing in the queue and all of this before we’ve made any of our own recommendations. Some of these are genuinely interesting - many of which with a security lens but deeply focused on engineering smarter and faster. There will certainly be a few new Claranet portfolio services that emerge from this work over time. Project-R2 can be stressful at times, and certainly at the moment it feels like a game of who can scale fastest and who’s going to blink first. I’ve not blinked yet. ...

2 days in London, one day with hardly any meetings at all and a todo list that’s getting longer by the day. 👨🏻‍💼 - Monday started with the usual monthly management meeting. Perhaps the most surprising aspect was the time was spent going deeper on fewer topics. This was due to the dual circumstances of some very pressing operational and financial issues to address combined with the fact that Project-R2 and the 6DG acquisition have resulted in many other initiatives being put on ice. Perhaps it was really a good show of agility of the management team. ...

With the bank holiday Monday, this week was one of those compressed 4-day weeks where everything seems to go in a flash. I’ve always been a silent advocate for the idea of a 4-day week, but most implementations I’ve seen take the approach of doing the same hours in a compressed period. I think I’ve come to realise that I don’t think this is something I could do, I don’t think I’ve got the energy for it and I don’t think it actually gives you the break you think it might. I suspect all it achieves is to make the weeks fly past even quicker. Anyway, that’s a rant for another day. This week, being a little shorter, just means that my focus was really on Project-R2, but as the light at the end of that tunnel draws closer so does the next one appear on the horizon. ...

Some weeks are peppered with small meetings like stand-ups and update calls - this wasn’t one of those weeks. This week I spent a day with a customer and the remaining days in longer 60-90 minute meetings. It was a refreshing change of pace. 🏘️ - Tuesday was a visit to a small market to town to spend four hours with another 6DG customer. Understanding their business, their 2027 strategy and what’s possible to support them with. As another financial services customer, this continues to expand my knowledge and understanding of the specific needs of this vertical and importantly the different requirements of retail banks, investment banks, insurance, payment providers and specialist finance operators. This particular customer was transitioning to AWS, so it was particularly important to me. ...

This week should have been a stressful week, as we come close to our first Project-R2 deadline, but for some reason it didn’t. The pressure felt less and I felt like a little bit more time to focus on me. Perhaps it’s a chicken-and-egg situation and spending a little more time on me has reduced my stress. Who knows, but anyway it’s been a good week with it’s usual amount of interesting titbits that are teasing for a deep-dive. ...

The first half of the week I was on the annual family camping trip and for the first time, not actually looking at my email of teams messages while on leave. This meant that Wednesday hit me like a bus, with hundreds of emails and messages and a back-to-back day of meetings. A few escalations into the mix was the real cherry on the cake. Thankfully by Friday, I’d caught up and my stress levels much reduced. My overall mood remains positive. ...

This week as bit of short week as Thursday and Friday I was on leave, but there were a couple of interesting conversations and customer meetings, which made a refreshing change and not a typical week. 👓 - On Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting two 6DG financial services customers. It seems I’m doing a lot more with customers in the financial services sector these days but both of these companies were very different and operated aspect of FSI that I had not come across yet. This was useful, not only so I can understand the nature of the existing relationships but also because it gave me an excuse to learn something new about the industries these companies work in and do some research as well as listening to them talk about their challenges. Travelling across London in the heat to meet each of these customers was not ideal, but I’m starting to enjoy these F2F meetings the more I get to do them. ...