Weeknotes

A week of R&R requires some much needed R&R… 🧯 - Well the week started with an escalation on Project-R. Nothing really drastic but a combination of small problems which has led to an unhappy customer. Thankfully both sides had planned for such an eventuality and we had a well documented structure in place so we just had to follow the playbook. A good test I guess, even it does mean my calls will be starting at 8am for the coming days. A good reminder that even in projects you should plan for failure and have open discussions early on about how to handle it. 🦾 - After receving the RFP for Project-R2 at the tail end of last week, I decent amount of my week was further reading and planning. Lots of questions to ask and assumptions we’ll need to make but it’s definitly an interesing oppertunity. Lots of people are worried about it though, so I’ll be taking on the emotional labour of getting everyone though the process over the next few weeks. If we win this one (and it’s a big if) then it’s one of those “once a year” projects that will keep up growing. Exciting but exhausting. 💬 - It was announced this week that there will be come upcoming changes in the business. Not impacting me or my role (so dodging that bullet this time) but we’re moving to a more practice/business-unit based org structure. I think this is a very postivie step forward. The discussions I had this week were about looking back on previous models and org structures including what worked well and what didn’t and how we can make this chance sucessful. I’ll less cynical this time around and feeling pretty confident about this change and it setting up the right foundations. 🏉 After a long week, on Friday we travelling into London to watch the Harlequins Women vs Gloucester Women at the Twickenham Stoop. Only my second ruby game and I absolutely loved it. My daughter also got to meeet england players Ellie Killdunne and Zoe Aldcroft, which was big highlight. 🍰 Last weekend was my mother’s 70th birthday so this weekend as an additional treat we decided to go to Fortnum and Mason for some afternoon tea. Great way to round off the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

New portfolio models, more roadmaps and the next big growth oppertunity. 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the london tube map design prinicpals). This started as a suggestion from marketing as a good visual to present what is now a long and quite complex portfolio of services. What it turned into was a great model to have conversations about customer journeys, portfolio gaps and service transitions. This week I managed to finalise the first version of the model and I’m pretty pleased with it. Looking forward to gettting feedback on it from sales, from wider business stakeholders and more importantly from customers. 🧰 - More time was spent this week building out the roadmap for internal systems (known as Epic 2). These are changes to support greater process efficiency, more automation in delivery and to support more future enhancements to our customer portal - giving more capability and more transparancy. I am really excited about this and the next six-months is going to some really great things. 🔍 - We also started a review of our monitoring capability. This took the form of looking at three levels - component-level (do we have any gaps?), application-level (how we bring more consistency of application awareness across our customers) and experience-level (how to we bring in our network and experience monitoring into the mix and how do we enhance it). We now have some actions at all levels and over the next month we’ll start to build this into a roadmap. I’m also starting to consider how much of this we expose to our customers as well. 📨 - Friday was a little visit to my old employer Mimecast. A heady compination of both problem solving, stratric planning and nostalgia. Claranet have had a partnership with Mimecast for many years (itself a long story) but this was the first time I had engaged with them directly. The hope is to turn this partnership into more of strategic one - but there is a long way to go on both sides for that. ...

Another week that was completely unlike the previous ones, with my having lots of different hats on from sales, finance and engineer. Certain keeps things interesting and a few new things to build on over the next couple of months. 📋 - I’ve been bending my brain thinking, planning and learning about knowledge management and document management. At the current time, like many other MSPs our knowledge management is diverse and inconsistent. This week I am been on a deep-dive to re-design our approach; thinking about documents, versioning, approvals, docuemntation and code, documentation in git repots, documentation in wikis and how to handle keeping things up-to-date where there is complex representations like tables and diagrams as well as text. I am in the process of writing this all down so that others can contribute to the new strategy. More plans to come. 🎙️ - In the middle on the week, I delivered two sessions of a webinar on our portfolio. It covered both the topic of my previous blog on why I hate product roadmaps, Claranet’s alternative to roadmaps and some of our upcoming focus areas. There has been quite a bit of prep for this over the previous week and I enjoyed working with my collegue Tom to present this - the back of forth always fun and making each session and slightly new experience. It’s been a while since I last delivered a webinar - I forgot how anxitious I get in the build up but also how much I enjoy it in the moment. 📈 - One of the lessons learned from working on large projects (like Project-R) is that how the project is constructed into deliverables, milestones and invoicing. It is a critical aspect and just as important as the solution itself. The middle of the week I spent re-viewing this again and ensuring that there are structures in play that are fair to both parties and that this is something we can take into future projects. ⛅ - I ended the week with an internal project kick-off for working on IBM Cloud. Yep - IBM. In a few months, when we have progressed more with it, I will do a little write up on the rationale here, but the sort description is that IBM have asked us to support the platform and they have lots of customers they are trying to keep on IBM Cloud or move to IBM Cloud as part of existing enterprise licensing agreements. This is a similar to the Oracle playbook of a few years ago. This is not just a tactical/oppertunitstic move on our part but also part of a wider strategy to focus more on enterprise customers. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week as been a week that has flown by in a series of small meetings and todo list items. I have been operating at about 40% for most of the week as I continue to fight off the seasonal cold (yes, I should take some sick days but you know I won’t because I still have iches to scratch). 🛝 - This week has been definitly been about all the small things (say it ain’t so!). I don’t just mean lots of tiny 15 minute meetings or 5 minute emails to fire off, but I mean that it’s been a week where the mistakes have been small but also the wins. These days I’m mostly involved in the larger projects and these can suffer with what I call “death by a thousand cuts” - a project that doesn’t fail in some big bang catastrophe but very slowly over time due to lots of tiny mitakes. A project can go from profitable to unprofitable like a leaky kitchen tap that no one really notices. The flip side to this is “growth by a thousand steps” - tweak a agent, improve a process, add an automated business rule. These things on their are often forgettable improvements, easily missed by focusing on the next thing. Well this week has had plenty of both of these extremes - I now have a long long list. 🚀 - We’ve been invested in developing our own tooling to support our engineers for several years now. The purpose of this tooling is to give us the best insight into our managed customers and to make migration and modernisation activities as easy as possible (so we can do more of them). This week saw another release from our team, enhancing our quality assurance and making sure that all the clouds we suppport have an equal set of features. We’re also working of some amazing AI tooling behind the scenes - but that’s for another day. I’m very proud of the team behind this and see how the tooling has matured as also it’s engagement. 💡 - A small other note this week - I’ve been back to doing some digging into some ideas and topics that iterest me. At the moment I’m spending time reading on some of the other cloud platforms (oracle cloud, ibm cloud, OVH) and also thinking about Operational Technology - both networks and security. Lots of ideas and scribbled notes. Nothing for now, but maybe a few things for the near future. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Another week with an office visit and another week where I feel connected to all corners of the business. However I ended the week with whatever bug is doing the rounds 😷 📈 - Another week with a big emphasis on sales. A combination of account planning, renewals and a few roadmap conversations with customers meant that overall it felt engaging, like we had some exciting plans and that some of our customers will continue to push us. 🎟️ - My time in the office also allowed me to be part of another set of folks going through their induction to the business. Having given my usual 25 mins on the products, our capabilities and the company, I got the usual around of questions. The questions are the reason I do it. We often hire other people from the industry and people with naturally ask questions in the context of where they have come from and their prior experince. This is great, because while answering their question I am also learning from them about their previous companies, products they are familair with and a little about the people asking those questions. I will try and follow-up with the people asking the most interesting questions to get even deeper insight. 🌱 - This week I spent more time with some of our project management team discussing ways to improve what they do and provide more context to the day-to-day decisions they make. I massively admire project managers, but they have a level of organisation that I don’t naturally have. I’ve always surrounded myself with people that have this skill. In the sessions this week we discussed giving them better visibility of the overall finacnes of the projects and also the downstream impacts on movements in project tasks. We worked on improving dashboards and automating some of their worst admin tasks. I enjoyed really getting into the weeds with this team and it gave me a new found empathy for what they do. 🔜 - With a focus on quarterly updates to our portfolio radar, this week has been focused on gathering and discussing all the latest updates. Plenty of new things going in and some exciting new roadmap items. Some won’t quite make it this time around, but it’s been a good exercise and I’ve enjoyed all the discussions. I suspect we’ll release internally next week and to customers the week after, as per the previous agreed cadence. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

A week of lots of new things, lots of scribbled notes, a new office and making sure I prioritise the right things. ✨ - I’ve been writing about Project-R for a long time now and for project as long as this it is important to recognise the milestones along the way. This week we rolled out some improvements to our customer portal, based upon the feedback from this project. This is a big step because it’s something that shows just how big projects often cause an overall improvement to all customers. This one been the last of these, but we took a small moment to celebrate the first. 🎠 - On Wednesday I went in London (into our new offices) for some account planning with our sales and CX team to discuss what the future looks like for some of our biggest customers. Always a good exploration of how advanced our relationships are and if we continue to have services that make us relevant. ⛅ - This week I had a few challenger questions on the topic of our cloud services - put simply: What’s next for cloud?. Well, cloud and datacenter services are certainly reaching maturity and some of which are over the tipping point of commodity, however despsite this when I think everything is done there is always just-one-more-thing. Still a few ideas around soverign, edge and a couple more hyperscale cloud providers to explore. A little bit more R&D in the near future I think. 🪫 - From time to time, I’ll have my closest work collegues check-in and make sure I’m ok - this week was one of those times. Clearly a sign that I am outwardly taking on too much at once, often this also triggers an internal pause when I realise I might be close to overwork (and sometimes even overwhelm). Working in IT and solving technical problems has always been a bit of an addictive habbit for me and working for an MSP continues to help me scratch that itch (there is a longer form post about this coming soon) but I do have to be careful sometimes. I’m very lucky to have people around me that look out for me and make sure I don’t strech myself too far. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Lots of activity looking forward this week, covering all aspects of finance, product and strategy. 📈 - As a continuation from last week, this week included more finance review sessions. While I’m already familiar with the numbers, these session were a good oppertunity for me to learn about how they are received and what data is important to the practice leads in their day-to-day operations. There were differences in each as to be expected but it the exitment and interest was obvious, proving that data doesn’t have to dull it just has to be relevant. 🧭 - This week I took a little bit of time to look back at an old strategy document. This was something I wrote for our senior leaders in 2023. It has, of course, aged a little but it has been interesting to see that we have continued forward towards the vision and maintained the values even if the implementation has been a little slower than I would have liked (but isn’t it always?!). I am starting to reflect on this as early next year I will be updating and perhaps on this occassion I can be a little more realistic about the small steps along the way. 🔎 - Last week I was working on a Copilot agent to help support the authoring of service descriptions. I shared this with a few people and started to get in a few of their ideas and roadmap items as documents to review. This was great because I was getting feedback from them on what worked and what didn’t in addition to reviewing the output myself all of which meant that I could tweak the agent for better outputs. Five service descriptions went to our legal team for the final stage of review this week - this is the most I have seen done in a long time. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

If I was to title this week’s weeknote it would be something like “Weeknote 77 - Wow’s and WTFs”, a week of scribbled notes, hurried calls and a tonne of ideas. It was one of those weeks where I could have table flipped but the thoughts and ideas that came out of all my meetings kept itching the back of my brain and it’s that dopamine hit that really keeps me doing this job. ...

Often there is a theme I can draw from the week or a particular topic or event that dominated either my time or thougts however this week was not one of those weeks. I will say however that now that I am 76 weeks into doing these I am starting to use AI to help me remember topics to blog about and to summarise re-occuring themes over the longer period. So if you’re reading this in your RSS feed or on my site, that’s awesome - you should let me know. Otherwise, here my AI agent overloads is another weeknote to feed you. ...

Where did this week, go? My calendar was full but staring at it’s multi-coloured hues I couldn’t say for certain what my output was. What I can say, is that this week was more about keeping the rails on the track and supporting all of those around me. 🧯 - Monday did not start on a good note, I had two escalations in my inbox to deal with and well, that pretty much set the tone for the whole week. Frustratingly while both different in their problem and from different customers they both had very similiar themes: we didn’t do X on time, we don’t trust you have the skills to do X. While resolved by the end of the week, it was a cold-shower momemnt that it doesn’t matter how good your service is or your skills are, if you your CX falls below the standard then trust gets chipped away and it takes 10x as long to fix that as it does the problem that caused it. 📄 - Project-R reached a big milestone this week. After a year of paperwork, documentation and building landing zones we’ve now migrated our first pilot machines. Still a big hill to climb but I’m going to sit here on this rock and take in the view for a couple of hours before getting back to working through the next series of challenges. 🖍️ - We have two big bids on the go at the moment and I had some time blocked out to review the content. I have to say we’re getting much better at responding to these types of things that we were even a year ago. I’m sure I’ll be trotted out to give a “why claranet” pitch soon enough - which I don’t mind, because I guineinly believe what I’m saying, but sometimes I wish there were a few others as passionate about telling that story as I am. 📓 - Project management is an MSP is a complicated beast. Multiple methods, multiple outputs, lots of different context to the various ways and means we implement it. Tasks, Estimates, Invoicing, Utilisation, resource planning. All complex, all messy. We’re got lots of people at the moment expanding their use of the new Microsoft Planner. I’ve been using this myself for a few weeks but this week I’ve started exploring it’s capabilities from a few different personas to see if it will work more boardly and help us deal with some of this complexity. As you’d expect it also has some Copilot integration, which at the moment I am a bit “meh!” about but we’ll see in a couple of weeks if I few on this tool improves. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...