Weeknotes

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 data center services are certainly reaching maturity and some of which are over the tipping point of commodity, however despite this when I think everything is done there is always just-one-more-thing. Still a few ideas around sovereign, 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 colleagues 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 habit 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 stretch 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 opportunity 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 excitement 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 occasion 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 thoughts 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 similar 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 moment 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 genuinely 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 broadly 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: ...

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 permanent 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 resilience. 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 practically 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 certified 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 changes, we’re also responsible 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 to do this and more importantly the customer experience and how we can innovate in this area to make it a less painful and less bureaucratic process for all involved. Lots of interesting tools and processes to dig my teeth into. More on this in the coming weeks. 💎 - I don’t play solutions architect 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 explore 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 scenario planning with a customer. One of our customers have recently been acquired and as is often the case in this scenario, we end up on calls with the new acquiring organisation walking them through that we do, details of the contracts and areas of responsibility - typical due-diligence stuff. This week, I got the opportunity 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 thought-provoking stuff actually. Access loss, ransomware, malicious 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 engagement 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 scribbles 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 definitely 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 pretend 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 separate post, but on Tuesday I was reminded by one of my amazing marketing colleagues about the London tube map and how it solves this type of problem. I will certainly 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 fascinating. 👐🏻 - 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 staff 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 occasionally. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...