Weeknotes

This week certainly felt like a productive week, albeit preparatory for the next couple of months to come. It’s been a few weeks since there have been any significant movement on Project-R to mention here. It has really been all about the backroom parts - negotiations, initial external legals reviews etc. All critical but not at all fun. This week has involved further workshops over contracting - specific details of clarification, updated schedules etc. Still not an exciting part of the overall project but at least showing significant momentum. This week I delivered the Resilience Webinar - after multiple hours of preparation I gave the 45-minute webinar. Now to move onto the follow-up stage. 45 minutes for a subject like this really felt like just the cliff notes, and in my hours of preparation I realised that there are lots of areas where I have thoughts, some opinions and research output I want to share. I am going to flesh this out more as a blog over the next few weeks. Second week of the month means another week of 2 x 3 hours of monthly management meetings. I could sit here and by cynical about such management sessions as an example of large-company bureaucracy, however the reality of these sessions is far from it. Much effort in put in during the week before to provide useful pre-read content, discussion topics are limited and 1-slide decision papers make up the majority of the time spent. It’s far from perfect, as we unlearn some typical “presentation management theatre” behaviours, but it’s started to be the foundation of stronger organisational communication and allowed us to progress more initiatives than was previous possible. I spent more time with Copilot Cowork as a follow-on from last week’s initial experiments. It’s becoming a little bit of a side-project for me and I’m getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. This week I was focused on the typical starting point of developing out more specific custom skills, in particular branded documents for a most commonly used content. I expect to spend another couple of weeks on this, covering several different documents types we have in use and then starting to build them out to fill in content gaps we have and structure the use of the skills into larger processes. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Having been off work for a week and then coming back to a 4-day week, I was certainly rushing to play catch-up. - I think my favourite part of this week is that I have been given access to a new toy which is Copilot Cowork. I’m just starting to experiment with it, starting first with your typical meeting management and document generation scenarios but I’m excited to see where it goes. I will almost certainly have a deeper dive on this in the coming weeks. ⛑️ - Next week I have a resilience webinar next week so there has been a lot of final prep to do this week. What’s been particularly useful about this topic is that I’ve got enough material not only for the webinar but likely for a longer form blog post, which I am also quite excited to finalise. ☔ - The overlap of a few projects, both internal and large external customers means that I’m expecting us to be entering a crunch period of change. This doesn’t happen often, perhaps once every two years but I can see it coming and I always take these things seriously and prepare my teams accordingly. That means ensuring we’re prioritising the things that are going to have the biggest impact in making us more efficient and also ensuring that each of my team leaders knows what to expect and how to handle it. Exciting and slightly nerve-wracking, but these are the types of periods that while a little horrid to live through, you look back on and see growth - personal as well as organisational. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week has been a week off that coincides with both the Easter break and my 40th birthday. It is also now 2 years since I have been completing these weeknotes. While I’ve been taking relaxation time to binge watch tv, I have also been working on this site as my on-going side project. 🏗️ - Checkout the /changelog to see things I have been adding to this site recently. I have mostly been using GitHub copilot to help me work through historical spelling and grammar issues as well as write addition Hugo templates or maintenance scripts that help make this site easier to maintain and keep it fresh. In particular this week I was working on the /now page so that it looks a little nicer and I have a script that I can run weekly to keep it fresh. I’ve been using it as an excuse to play a bit more with GitHub Copilot and while the development cycle takes a bit of getting used to - I admit, it gave me that dopamine hit from coding that I’ve not had in a long time. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

A stacked calendar, rainbow coloured with context switching, but ending with a feeling of progress. This week was another progressed RFP and presentation. Given the frequency of these now, the team are certainly getting slicker at it and the content and story is getting tighter. The one this week was certainly a useful session that was actually more Q&A focused, so felt more workshop than usual presentation. I can’t say all are like this - I’ve certainly seen some recently that are presenting the RFP content that the recipients haven’t read. April is the start of budget season so that means that the end of March means that I need to spend time reviewing cost owners and documenting my high-level budget objectives (asks and removals). Can be a little boring but is a good reflection point on what we need to achieve the next set of objectives. If you’ve read anything on this site then you know that I like writing, but I’ve come to understand that lots of people in our business also like videos. That means meeting people where they are and ensuring that for all documents or presentations that I produce, that I also provide companion videos. This week I caught up on a bit of a backlog of them; everything from portfolio updates, team updates and breakdown of the strategy. Videos ranging from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. I’ve come to actually enjoy them. I’ve also come to find additional value from them because the very act of having explain something out loud and pre-empt questions actually improves the corresponding written words themselves. I expect to continue to do a lot of these and I’m encouraging others as the combination of writing and videos is good pre-read material to avoid too many monologue meetings. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week I have mostly been in workshops with both partners and customers. Getting some miles in, tired, but worth it. 🏢 - On Tuesday, I spent the day at the IBM UK HQ talking to them about their portfolio of products and our planned strategy for further collaboration with them over the next year. Despite their market perception as “big blue” the most corporate of corporate companies, they actually have some really good tech and solve some really cool problems. This is the first workshop with them of a series that will happen over the next few months as we align ourselves. I am hopeful for what can be achieved here. 🚁 - Also this week I attended a customer QBR. All our corporate customers have these sessions and while I often attend the sessions for our Top-25, I also like to occasionally drop into some of our others because it allows me to get a better view of “reality vs vision”. Boy, did I! Lots of little things for us to improve on - nothing massive that is damaging their service or the relationship but lots of feedback that made me cringe - which tells me we still have a long way to go. Awkward, but still enjoyable and absolutely useful. 🚄 - When I wasn’t in London, I was on my way to spend the day with a customer in Lille. I do this about twice a year and it’s a good opportunity to meet some folks face-to-face that I mostly only ever see on teams. I also forgot just how many small clarifications and side conversations happens when in person. Coffee, lunch, problems fix and roadmap developed. I also find that having a few hours on the Eurostar is great for my personal productivity. 🏉 - Yes, another weekend of rugby activities. This time of year, it’s Love Rugby season, a few weekend sessions where the team turn up and have fun and games with people trying rugby for the first time. For the adults its just a good social and an opportunity to reflect on how far our kids have come since they started rugby through the same first-time sessions. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Working for any company that is still growing an ambitious, there are occasional moments of pause when you’re standing at the bottom of Everest and thinking “Wow! That’s going to be amazing up there” and at the same time “Damn! I’ve got to climb that.” Well this was one of those weeks. 🙉 - The week started with some SMT governance and, while we’re all still finding our feet with the new sessions, there has already been some lessons learnt and some structural aspects that I’ll be taking into my own team sessions. One thing I am enjoying is the gradual move away from slides to documents for our pre-read content. 📋 - On the topics on documents, I also had a session this week discussing plans around ISO 20000 adoption. This is a standard that has become more relevant to us now that it is part of the G-Cloud framework and we’re engaging more in public sector activities. The first step of this process is bottom-up review of all of our documentation with the main aim of making it not just internally useful (an ISO 9001 requirement) but also in a position to be presented to our customers who increasingly want to see this level of detail. A big job, and not the most exciting but with some help from AI and some time documenting our style guides, it shouldn’t be too difficult to reach this first milestone. 🔩 - ServiceNow is the beating heart of the MSP business, but there are always aspect to this platform I am learning about and planning on adopting more. This week, we started looking a improving our project management capabilities in the platform, extending the QA processes and improving our time recording. The moment I start talking to people about their use of the platform I always come away with a long list of ideas - always a good sign and often a highlight of the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week was a crunch week, and I my calendar tells me is going to be the start of a crunch month. Long hours, lots of context switching, but also lots getting done that will hopefully bring in some interesting work over the rest of the year. 👔 - Project-R2 crunch week as we get ready to submit BAFO. Lots of moving parts, small changes, last minute questions and internal project planning as we prepare for what we think is an almost inevitable win of the customer engagement. If we win this then there is going to be weeks of hiring, onboarding, more project planning and customer site visits. All this last minute work is worth it though because if the data tells me anything, it’s that we are going to learn as much from them as they are from us. I expect to be involved in this one, if not directly, for several years to come. 🤖 - If things weren’t busy enough, the ocean of small admin activities - objectives (team and personal), to-do actions and the email backlog was seemingly endless. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was spending a bit more time on automation and building useful agents, well this admin area is certainly somewhere where automation continues to be a help and I will need to continue to invest in. I think I’ll be posting a few more things onto /devlog as I advance some of these things. 📥 - The week another two RFPs landing on our desk. I feel sorry for our bid team who are co-ordinating so many at the moment. We’re certainly noticed that the timelines are now shorter, which I think is based upon an assumption that both reading and responding is supported by AI. While there is some truth to that, I often still take the time to read end-to-end because there are often small nuggets of information or detail that I find just doesn’t come out from my first-pass AI summary. We’re also working on some style guides for written AI because slop is real and I’m getting increasingly frustrated with having to edit large quantities of it. While it certainly speeds up the overall submission process, the work of our editors (of which I am occasionally one) is a painful task. 🏉 - A ruby triple feature this weekend where we attended the Harlequins Women vs Saracens Women and made it home in time to watch the England vs Italy men’s game. Sunday was my daughter training at home as usual, but by that point I was happy to spend a few quite hours at home before the week begins again. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week certainly felt like a rush while I was in it, but on reflection I think I managed to find a bit of balance between work and personal things this week. 🤠 - I started the week, deep into the archives of our portfolio after I was escalated to about a customer with a service that I didn’t think we provided any more. This ended up in a small side quest of reviewing customers on old services, on old services description and trying to understand risk and impact. Turns out we still manage Active Directory for some SMB customers and also that RDS hosting is still a thing for some of our customers despite the fact that AVD has been out since 2019. Anyway, working the product team we now have a plan and I can put away my fedora and whip. 🗄️ - I had an interesting vendor call with Panzura this week. We’re been re-selling them to our architecture and construction companies for a while now, but they have a portfolio pivot, a new partner structure and we have a few new use-cases. Vendor calls can always be a bit tricky, as you don’t want to show too much enthusiasm or commit too much but also not be too aloof. A good outcome for me is that I come away from the sessions with something to think about - it means they’ve found a gap and sparked my interesting. This was one of those sessions. 📥 - Project-R2 keeps ploughing on - four more weeks and we’ll have our answer. This week was more information in the data room and more Q&A. It meant a lot of reacting to daily uploads and stand-up calls at the start and end of each day and we made frequent small adjustments to our proposal as we got further into the detail. 🐾🏥 - More vets visits and also a hospital check-up visit for me. Nothing scary or anything to worry about but it mean more running around, juggling my calendar and working later than I would normally to balance our the time off in the day. I am always grateful to be in a position to have this flexibility but damn is it difficult to re-schedule things. 📚 - One thing we’ve started doing in our house is having a few hours on a Sunday afternoon without TV and without our phones. We mostly use this time to read books. While I certainly enjoy the habit I have of reading for 30 minutes before bed, I have some to really appreciate the extra couple of hours as relaxation time and a great way to balance our the typical Sunday afternoon anxiety. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week was one of low-level frustration as I run around gather information and then fighting with tools to improve my day-to-day workflow. Lots learnt, but annoying. 🕵️ - This week was dominated by working on a single public-sector framework bid. I’ve really learnt about the hard work our bid team goes through and how important it is to have up-to-date company information and case studies with rich meta data. I spent several hours this week, not only helping to answer some of the more complex questions but also running around helping fill some gaps in this bid content. Equal parts boring, frustrating and educational. Lessons learnt, to-do list added to. 🗃️ - I got to shadow a meeting this week between a customer and some of my German colleagues talking about SAP. This is such a huge and specialist area and it was great to start at the beginning, see how our services are presented to customers so that I can work backwards, dig into the technical details and learn lots along the way. I’m coming across SAP more and more as I work with larger customers so this was a good starting point. 🤖 - Like everyone these days I am viewing every tasks I perform in my role with the simple question - could this be automated and could AI do it? I have a few different AI tools available to me, but as a manager the path of least resistance for a number of tasks is Microsoft Copilot. I spent more time than I should have this week with Copilot Studio trying to automate a series of tasks. I am not finished and I am left full of rage for this. There might even be a “I hate Copilot” blog post coming soon. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

More meetings, more bids, more vets visits. 🏢 - This week started with new internal governance sessions for the management team. One commercial, one operational. Really focused on data, decisions and ensuring all senior managers are focused on the same priorities. Lots of lessons, but the biggest one being that data quality and access to data still remains an on-going concern. We made some good steps forward though and I’m looking forward to these future sessions every month. 🧘 - I am spending more time with our pre-sales folks with 1:1s to gather information on how to improve our pre-sales experience. Pre-sales is one of the first interactions customer have with us and the ease and speed of these first interactions can make or break a relationship. There is also the goal to make pre-sales more efficient for the company and giving the pre-sales folks the right tools which will speed up customer acquisition time. 💸 - I read four large RFI bid documents this week. This takes time, even with AI (because details matter) but it’s also exciting. I look out for what I call “Easter Eggs” - the things that are unusual, difficult or require more discussion. Large opportunities are the life blood of the business and can be a bit boring after a while, so I enjoy digging into one or two that have something we can learn from. 🐾 - My large dog had her surgery this week so some chaos has ensued, both practically and in the calendar - but all is well in the end. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...