Weeknotes

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 achieve, 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 acquired 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 getting 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 things I’ve learnt. 🥂 - 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 nuggets though it’s something we certainly should be talking more about. 👷🏼 - Wednesday was all about automation projects. I’ve been focusing for a couple of weeks on making sure we double-down on automation and integrations between systems - the big stuff, but this week I got a bit of time to hoover up through a long list of “little automation activities”. 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 cyber security 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 certainly 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 opportunity 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 remember being as technically literate as they are now when I was their age, I was all energy and drive, but not as knowledgeable 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 town hall 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 “animated” 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, subtleties and edge cases that it really does take a good bit of design work to establish something that provides a positive customer experience. Not finished yet, but not dreading it either. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

Project-R continues to be a significant theme of my weeks, however this week was mostly focused on ensuring the best service experience so I can’t complain too much about that. I will however complain about having to give the best version of myself while it’s 27+ degrees in rooms without air conditioning. 🥵 📄 - My week started working on Project-R working with the customer of their service design document. This is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. The purpose is to take what’s in the contract, which can be seen as the red-lines of the service and start having deeper conversations about what they want the experience to look and feel like. It mostly involves conversations about scenarios, edge cases, previous experiences and KPIs. All of this then gets written down in a document that is shared and can be updated over time as both parties learn to work together. 🧩 - On Wednesday I went to Leeds for our first face to face meeting for Project-R. This is the first time I had met the customer representatives F2F despite having worked with them almost daily for the best part of a year. I really found it a useful experience and I’m reminded that whatever the distance that needs to be travelled, meeting people in-person with some regularity builds relationships that can help during difficult times. Don’t ever skip this stuff. 🤹 - I would say the week ended on a bit of a down note. Not because anything went wrong but because I had two days of near back-to-back meetings where 50% of them were 15-20 minute status update or decision meetings. Not in itself a problem, I love to see a 15m meeting vs the default 30m as it really focuses everyone, however when they are back to back it can be quite wearisome. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week was a week of things that help build the future. 🪂 - Tuesday I was meeting a customer in Manchester. It was a sales meeting, but one to a very technical audience so very much no B*S. It was a session that could have stalled the relationship just as easily as it could have extended it. It didn’t go exactly as expected but we walked away with not one, but two opportunities. Just reminds me that sometimes despite hard work and plenty of relationship building, a touch a luck also helps. 🔑 - PIM and PAM are two staples of secure access management to customer environments. This week I had to facilitate a discussion on our PIM implementation for access to our AWS customer environments. A 6-step process, spanning 3 systems. Yes, it’s secure and yes it’s the right thing to do but the engineer-experience of actually having to access systems is more than a bit painful. If this isn’t the death of ClickOps I don’t know what will be. 🗃️ - This week I also started expanding on the topic of our Change Catalogue. A core element of any managed services portfolio, this week I facilitated some conversations about expanding our change catalogue, automating more of it and talking to customers about moving more change into standard click-button changes. 🎢 - RFPs. That sometimes out of nowhere sales activity that typically involves filling in a spreadsheet with hundreds of questions. I have a love/hate relationship with these things. I hate the ones copy-n-pasted from three different RFPs aimed and three different types of organisations - it’s just lazy procurement. I hate the ones that want you to do design work for free. I love the ones that ask difficult or awkward questions that force me to look at how we operate and I love the ones that include requirements for large parts of our portfolio because it makes me think about how it all fits together. This week was only one portfolio item, and I had two days to do it, but it was well written and I learnt some stuff doing it. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

I can already tell that June is going to be a busy one with lots of content, lots of collaboration and me writing even more words in even more places. ☁️ - I spent some time this week discussing our IaC set-up this week, except this time it was about our VMware private cloud environment. I go back and forth on the value of IaC (I almost wrote a blog a few weeks ago on its decline) and there has certainly been less attention, from us and from customers, in managing private cloud with IaC. Well we’ve been pushing this forward as part of bringing consistency across our services. I have some good meetings with the team this week discussing all the edge cases and how we handle them. 🌼 - On Wednesday I was back in the London office to meet with the AWS account manager of one of our most important customers. It was a great session and part of re-igniting our relationship with AWS. Certainly lots to think about, but also reassuringly not much has changed in how to get the most out of working with AWS. The usual topics - POCs, MAP, marketplace, professional services. I’m even giving some thought to formatting some of our roadmap of services into PRFAQs (wonder if I could get ChatGPT to help with this?). 🖇️ - Some time was spent this week working with our product, technical and brand teams on some of our document templates. A little boring for some, but when lots of what we do is professional services then this is one of the ways with which we increase the standards and quality of the output of our work. There is also a little bit of technical design work that also goes into these templates so it’s really a collective effort. ⚒️ - We had the first dedicated working group on our automation activities. Like any engineering organisation, we’ve been automating the work we do for years but it’s always been in small pockets, individual people or side-projects from each team. This week we started a working group to bring together all the individuals and align all the work to specific portfolio services, my focus is making sure everyone is pulling in the same direction. It was an exciting session for me,getting to sit back and see the vast array of ideas and skills across the teams. If we deliver all of the things on our roadmap for the next 6-months then we’ll be 100% better managed service business than we were 12-months ago. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Some weeks there isn’t a theme, just a grab bag of vaguely interesting stuff happens … ⭐ - My appraisal. If you’ve read any of my blogs or weeknotes, you’ll know I’m pretty good at being reflective. I think I generally have a pretty fair and balanced view of myself and my performance so I wasn’t really expecting too much out of my appraisal. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a more positive response than I had judged myself again - which was a nice mid-week boost. I feel I’ve worked pretty hard this year on a number of professional and personal fronts and it was nice to have that acknowledged. Next onto goals. 🫶🏻 - New potential partners AWS and AI. Building partner relationships is a bit of a complex beast (maybe a blog post in here on this one) but I got the pleasure of meeting two new potential partners this week. One AWS focused partner that I am very excited about, not only because of their technology and customer base but also because of their relationship with AWS which could really enhance and boost our own. The second partner was a follow-up from a contact I may in Dubai, who has an interesting LLM operations and testing tool that I am very excited to get to play with a bit more. Exciting to build these into our plans for new services. ⛯ - Roadmap - part 4 - the tech radar. So the portfolio journey continues. This time re-writing my previous work into it’s final customer-facing format. I don’t like roadmaps (for reasons I’ll blog about soon), so I was focused on using a variation on the Thoughtworks Tech Radar format which I have found is a great format for presenting portfolio in terms of lifecycle, customer adoption and why. It’s not been the easiest to put together and will likely take me at least another week to complete and get final review but it’s been a great exercise with lot of additional learning, even with all the previous weeks preparation I have done. If you’re responsible for product or portfolio then I strongly recommend it. Edit: (06-Sept-2025) I have added the post on why I don’t like roadmaps ...

Training, reflecting, planning, nurturing … 🦩 - Sales training. One day in the London office and one day in the Leeds office. Working with out sales teams on how to sell our cloud portfolio as a solution sell alongside other portfolio areas. Also, reviewing some competitors and some example sales scenarios. I always enjoy doing these sorts of things because it gives me a temperature check for our sales teams and I always get new questions and sometimes things I hadn’t considered. ⛯ - Roadmap - part 3. Presenting the roadmap work to Charles and some of the other senior leadership team. It’s a key step to get buy in for the investments we’re trying to make and the portfolio areas we’re focusing on. It was a good session, with some good feedback and where some clarification is required. More to come on this next week, as I start to expand out on the structure, and the why. 🀚 - Backup and DR automation. I’ve been having some interesting conversations this week about the current state of backup and disaster recovery tooling, automation and the customer experience. This has nothing to do with the recent very public M&S incident, but it certainly made me reflect on how seriously organisations take these processes. There will be another full blog post on this soon, but the TLDR is there still a lot of innovation to be done on this space, for these services to achieve the outcomes that people expect that they already do. 🤔 - Appraisal time. Yes, it’s that time of year again when I reflect on my own perform and the performance of others. Did I meet my objectives? Were they the right ones? What’s next? Some years this feels like a bit of a ticket box exercise, but this might be the first year in a quite a while where both I and by colleagues are taking it a bit more seriously. This means having a lot more, meaningful deeper conversations that aren’t rushed and objectives are set based on business outcomes and personal reflection. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...