Weeknotes

As I read back over the past weeknotes I realise that there has been a bit of rhythm where by each week a different aspect of my role comes to the forefront for that week. I’ve worn the sales hat, the systems engineer hat, the strategy hat, and this week it’s certainly the people manager hat. 🧔 - We’re entering annual appraisal season, which means I have to prepare for and deliver appraisals over the next 6 weeks for each of my 13 direct reports. This week I started preparations. Not the easiest thing to do as I have only been responsible for this team for six out of the twelve months and there is very limited information on 1:1s prior to me taking over. Like all of my knowledge-work activities these days I am also using this as an opportunity to train a cowork skill to capture useful information, coaching me on improving the feedback and formatting the output for input into our HR system. Likely that I’ll have a few more updates on this in the weeknotes to come. ...

This week is probably the most CTO-like profile of a week I’ve had in a while. Covering all business areas and also finding some time for a bit of personal growth along the way. - I started the week back wearing my portfolio hat. Planning the next publication of our Portfolio Radar (product catalog). This is always a fun time for me because I get to speak to all the product managers and find out what new things are coming on the roadmaps of each area and how discussions about how they all fit together. It’s bit of a time commitment to keep this content fresh but really it’s really just an output and it’s the conversations and the alignment that are the real value. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...