Weeknotes

A 4 day week this week, in which everyone does a full weeks work in four days due to the bank holiday. I would still like this to be a permenant fixture one day, however so fingers crossed for that. I would say this week has a very “enterprise” feel about it, more documents, more process, more conversations about very enterprise problems and enterprise products. 🧑‍🚒 - I’ve been working with our engineering teams on merging together a few internal documents into something external we are able to provide to customers about how we deliver operational resiliance. This is backup, patching, disaster recovery, compliance. As you’d expect we have lots of documentation on this sort of thing, cover lots of different scenarios. By putting this all in one place under what we’re calling the “Operational Assurance Plan” we can have joined up conversations with our customer and build reassurance that we’ve covered all of their scenarios and that we practially know exactly how to deliver it. ✍🏻 - You’d probably be shocked about the amount of documentation we produce and maintain as an IT company, both internally and on behalf of our customers. As a company that is ISO 9001 cerfified it’s something we take pretty seriously, but it’s not something that is easy or we take for granted. With Project-R, we have not only a very long contract and set of contractual chanages, we’re also responsibile for maintaining upwards of 20 documents as part of their service. With this is mind, I’m going back to basics and looking the processes we use do this this and more importantly the customer experience and how we can innovate in this area to make it a less painful and less beuractric process for all involved. Lots of interesing tools and processes to dig my teeth into. More on this in the coming weeks. 💎 - I don’t play solutions arcitect often these days (we have a good team of people for that) but when I do it’s often in the enterprise space, with those expensive systems that expensive to touch - think: Oracle, SAP, Dyanmics, IBM. Well I’ve had more than one conversation about these types of products this week and I think I’ll be putting my product hat back on in this are shortly. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

While the theme of this week is mostly working through reading and drafting customer documents, I’ve been exploring a few back-to-basics things that will improve services for our customers. 🪛 - Like most MSPs we’re a big ServiceNow user. However, I’ll admit, despite having spent about 8 years using it almost daily I’ve only really started to explor all it’s features, all it’s modules and it’s it’s automation and workflow possibilities over the past few months. This week I started being a bit more deliberate about my learning/digging. Document management, vendor management, GRC, maintenance and blackout windows, business rules. Scribbling notes and scheduling demos. 🌊 - DR sceanrio planning with a customer. One of our customers have recently been acquired and as is often the case in this sceanrio, we end up on calls with the new acquiring organisation walking them through that we do, details of the contracts and areas of reponsibility - typical due-dilliance stuff. This week, I got the oppertunity to sit in on one of these calls, specially focused on DR (as I’m paying more attention to this topic at the moment) as the customer asked questions we went through a number of different scenarios. Really though-provoking stuff actually. Access loss, randomware, macilitious actor, force majeure events, testing frequencies. I let my team do the talking, I was just there to scribble notes and think about how we can improve our service for this customer (and all our DR customers) later. 👷🏻 - You’d think that after decades of running customer projects that this would be an area of pure standardisation with little to re-think or innovate - well you’d be wrong. I’ve been observing how we deliver different types of projects for some time. Different scenarios, different enagement models, different team structures - I think we run them all at different times. I’m been thinking a lot more about it this week and trying to put those thoughts into words. I expect that those internal documents may resurface summarised in a blog post here at some point. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Having a week and a half off work typically means consuming content and letting my mind wander. This week was no different and you’ll be able to notice from my usual weekly stats that I have certainly consumed more than my usual numbers. It was also been a week of odd jobs that let my mind wander and for ideas for form. I can image that the first few days back to work next week will involve turning all my scribles in my note app and on random bits of paper into actions and more interesting content. ...

This week I am publishing the weeknote from my phone as I lay in a field on the annual family camping trip. Monday and Tuesday were still chaotic work days but the remainder has been some much needed down time. 🔎 - Monday was spent with teams reviewing some internal processes, with a key focus on adding more automation between our security, risk, problem and incident management processes. I’m excited to see some of these things come into effect because we’re seeing improvements to both customers and our front-line engineers. 🤝 - Tuesday was my last working day for a week and half so was all about emails and handovers. Thankfully, there is plenty of momentum on our projects at the moment and I’ve been much better as writing down ideas and guardrails more regularly so there was very little to handover. These are periods that help me observe the resilience of our tech teams, particularly during holiday periods. 🏕️ - Wed-onwards is the annual family camping, an opportunity to read, write, catch up on a backlog of white papers and generally not do much. While this is a time for me to decompress, I also find it to be one of my most creative periods where I often end up with my notes app full of questions and ideas. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week definitly felt like a slower week, but perhaps that’s just a bad comparison to last week. I managed to deep-dive into a few technical areas I don’t usually touch and also take some time to step back and think about the next steps for the portfolio. 🏛️ - A few times this week I found myself in topics about standards, compliance or regulations. This came up first as part of Project-R, but then also in two additional calls with customers. This included GDPR (and the DPDPA), PCI:DSS and the riveting handbook that is the FCA regulations. While I don’t pertain to be an expert in these areas, they come up so frequently that I think our portfolio needs to highlight them a lot more than it does today. Good insight, much reflection. 🚇 - I’ve had this niggling problem for a little while now about the best ways to visualise our portfolio to different stakeholders, especially when there is a lot of information to present. I could write a lot more words on this, maybe in a seperate post, but on Tuesday I was reminded by one of my amazing marketing collegues about the london tube map and how it solves this type of problem. I will certaintly be thinking more about this for some portfolio representation in the future, but I also think I want to read more on its design, history and UX as it sounds fasinating. 👐🏻 - I was reminded again this week that there are things I have been working on that are now in a state of maturity that they can and should be delegated and the importance of enablement. That could be something I’ve written, something I’ve automated or decisions I make. Just like the calendar de-frag, this is a bit of an individual-contributor defrag, making sure that my own contribution is more about others than myself. Thankfully I have a great team around me who always keeps me on my toes and reminds me when it’s time, even if I forget occassionally. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week turned out to be an unusually productive week. It was also a week where I was more in consume mode that production mode, spending more time reading and reviewing and less time writing than I am normally used to. This type of work is what has allowed a larger amount of treadmill steps this week that I would normally achive, but it has also resulted in me having consistently more energy. ...

A new routines, a bit more energy, a bite more productivity and a few more ideas … 🏃🏻‍➡️ - If you’ve been paying attention for the past few weeks, you will have noticed that there has a marked decline in my step count since I accquired by manual treadmill. Well apparently this is quite common, but I was not happy about it. So I stated this week with a small change to my routine by gettting up 1hr earlier to spend an extra hour on the treadmill, while watching something on netflix, so I can get an extra 5k steps in. It’s been great, giving me a bit more of a boost before work and with the double-win of getting to watch a few more tv shows on my list. 📙 - Work started with some time reviewing this year learning and development strategy. A bit focus this year is on structure and validation. We now have some really good role-based learning paths, a good LMS and the ability to track the programme. Next step will be to review progress monthly and ensure everyone has enough time in their week to spend on their development. 📄 - This weeks technical/orgaisational challenge relates to design documents. We’re all done them, high-level designs and low-level designs are pretty typical in most of the work we do, sometimes to provide validation and reassurance (as we are an outsourced organisation) sometimes for compliance reasons. The most traditional downside to these documents in they age quickly. This weeks challenge was agreeing an approach where by these documents are kept up-to-date without the burden of daily versioning for every change. Lots more thoughts on this, both in terms of process and tooling. Maybe I should write another post on some of these learnings. 🥂 - The week ended with the sales kick-off, a time when I usually present one or two things and in return I get to have a lot of conversations and gather a lot of peoples ideas. I usually come away with a lost of notes and follow-ups and this week was no different. Great BBQ, great company, good end to the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

It wasn’t an easy week, but it really left like progress was made … ⚡ - Monday, was one of those rare days where my Teams went into offline mode, my meetings were cleared (mostly) and I sent the day working on a few of my individual contributor activities. Most of this was some content for Project-R but I have to say, as I have mentioned in a previous weeknote, writing is an act of understanding. I thought I was facing a day or writing down well understood things out of my head and onto the page, however the process certainly raised some questions and now I have one or two things to go and get answers for. 🎓 - This week was kicking off R&D season again, a few weeks where we go back over the internal projects we’ve worked on over the past year with an external auditor. Not the most exciting, however it’s an important reflection point about just because something is internally useful doesn’t mean it’s R&D and doesn’t mean it’s particularly special. When we find those nugets though it’s something we certainly should be talking more about. 👷🏼 - Wednesday was all about automaiton projects. I’ve been focusing for a couple of weeks on making sure we double-down on automations and integreations between systems - the big stuff, but this week I got a bit of time to hoover up through a long list of “little automations”. These are the things that may take someone an additional 10 seconds to do in a process e.g. fill in this extra fields or go and lookup this data but they are the type of thing that when done a few hundred times a day can really make a difference if fixed. Some of these are a bit of “self own” i.e. making people fill in data we should already known from information in other systems. It’s been good to speak to people on the front line of our services and get these little things priorities that make jobs easier and make our customer experience better. ⛑️ - Lifecycle management, the day-to-day means on handling technical debt has been a huge topic for us this year, really brought front and center by all the recent very public cybersecurity events. Well, working for an MSP you can we have to deal with a lot of infrastructure that is less and perfect and this week I certaintly had to have my fair share of difficult conversations about this topic. I honestly don’t mind that part, I’m just happy that it’s getting the attention it deserves and that we now have AI to help speed up the process a little. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

A week of two halves … 🗃️ - I started the week, returning to my previous work of change catalogues. The main aim being to ensure we don’t have any gaps, that all the things we manage have at least one known, standard change. There are a few gaps and it’s a bigger job than I was expecting but given it’s impact to all our customers it’s a useful exercise. Still work to be done over the next few weeks on this. 👦🏻 - This week we also had another intake of work experience people and I got the oppertunity to talk to them and answer their questions for a couple of hours. This was quite fun and I’m always amazed about the standard of kids coming out of mainstream education. I don’t rememeber being as technically literate as they are now when I was their age, I was all energy and dive, but not as knowledgable that’s for sure. 🎭 - I had the pleasure of taking a nice mid-week day off to attend Tim Minchin’s gig in Brighton. A picnic on beach, some cocktails and Ivy Asia and the gig in the evening. Honestly, wonderful and a break that I needed. 🏢 - Friday was one of our company “Townhall” session, and I was in London presenting on portfolio and answering questions. The questions were good and it was commented how my presentations are always “animiated” which I’ll take as a compliment. Take away from this is that I need to produce more content in different forms e.g. 1-pagers, small videos etc and that people want to hear more about all the things we doing more often. Good insight and good end to the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

“I learn in pictures, but I understand in words” … ⛯ - I spend most of the week working on further portfolio writing, trying to get the first draft document completed before it goes off for further technical review and branding next week. The week concluded with the document done, and I’m pretty proud of the 15k words of it’s contents. I learn quite a bit a long the way in putting it together and I already have plenty of ideas for Vol #2. 📄 - In later half of the week I spent continuing my work on the Service Design document from last week. This is another one of those tasks where I am learning more in the process of writing it than I thought I would at the start. My knowledge of ITIL is pretty good, but there are so many implementation details, subtlities and edge cases that it really does take a good bit of design work to establish something that provides a postive customer experience. Not finished yet, but not dreading it either. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...