The week of Christmas always passes with the contradiction of flying past and feeling like the longest week. Family enjoyment all around. 📈 - This weeks stats: 377 minutes of podcasts 4,449 average weekly steps 53 book pages read (1984 - p149-202) 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: Bridgerton - S02 + S03 Amandaland Christmas Special Stranger Things - S02 A Ghost Story for Christmas - 2025
First week of my 3 weeks of leave, I have mostly been focused on … nothing much. Decompressing from a pretty stressful couple of months of work means that this week is binge watching lots of TV and movies, catching up on reading articles, white papers and some books and trying not too think about too much work. What that means is my background entertainment section below is larger than usual, I’ll be shortly adding a few more entries to /bookmarks and there I’ll be spending a day next week drafting one or two blog posts for the coming year. ...
My last working week before Christmas meant, looking back and looking forward. I’m not going to spend too much time looking back during this weeks weeknote, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for my blog post on that so this week has more been about preparations, hand-overs and looking forward. 🖊️ - I spent a decent amount of time this week writing down my strategy for the cloud practice. This is not about some manager aggrandising but something that is important for the wider business to understand the things we’ll be focusing on as a team (and consequently things we won’t be). It’s actually something that has been an ask from the engineers themselves for some time, that they would like to have a clear communicated strategy, something that focuses them all towards a goal. Hopefully what I am working on will achieve that. This week was the first draft. It will take a first pass through the other directors and then the team leads before a final version is presented to everyone else. This is not the first time I’ve written such a thing and I base my approach on the famous (infamous?!) AWS 6-pager format. While I am not dogmatic about the approach, having something in written form backed by real data I do believe is important. So let’s see if it passes the first sniff test. ...
Another big Project-R2 week this week, but also really getting to know my new team much better and thinking about the future. 🗣️ - The result of last weeks crunch time meant that a few of my 1:1s had to be pushed back a few days. I hate having to move 1:1s because I respect the time I spend with people and the mutual value of the sessions, however in this case, even if I could have shuffled things I don’t think I would have been in the right mental state to support them the way they deserved to be supported. The knock-on effect of moving the sessions was the first two days of the week being jam-packed with 1:1s. Taking on a new team is not easy but I’ve certainly found it easier this time and I’ve learnt my lesson by giving myself 15m breaks between sessions that ensure I’m always bringing the right energy and focus to each session. ...
Crunch week. No avoiding it, this was a tough one. 3 days in the office, one evening working into the early hours of morning but it’s over now and I can take a couple of days rest before the next stage starts. Did I mention it’s only 2 weeks until I’m on leave for Christmas?! ⚰️ - Project-R2 is out the door. The RFP response got completed with superhero manoeuvres from several people working right up until the submission deadline. It was the reason for my office visits and took over 95% of my week. There are mixed feelings about this one. Scary/Exciting if we win it, but also Sad/Relieved if we don’t. Either way, next week follows with the presentation stage right until January - more work ahead. ...
This week has been the start of crunch time. Lead for Project-R, author for Project-R2 and now Cloud Practice Director has meant long hours with context switching fuelled by caffeine and some good work colleagues. I say crunch time because I’m doing this with full awareness that is short term (a few weeks - not a sustained position) and what comes out the other side will hopefully be worth it. Despite the support (at work and at home) and the shining light at the end of the tunnel I’m not sure it’s made it any easier. It’s been a rough one. ...
Sometimes there are weeks that really push my mental resilience, testing how far I can stretch my abilities to multi-task, prioritise and still ship things. This is one of those weeks. I can confidently say I left nothing on the table. 🪆 - Project-R2 continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Asked to build a dedicated team for the opportunity, it really means looking at building an MSP inside an MSP. Engineering, Support, HR, Finance, all elements are being considered. Good exercise, but getting in all written down and actually filling out the RFP responses continues to drain and be impacted by the occasional executive dysfunction. ...
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 run-book. 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. ...
New portfolio models, more roadmaps and the next big growth opportunity. 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the London tube map design principals). 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 getting feedback on it from sales, from wider business stakeholders and more importantly from customers. ...
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, documentation and code, documentation in git repositories, 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. ...