Weeknotes

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. ...

This week was one of low-level frustration as I run around gather information and then fighting with tools to improve my day-to-day workflow. Lots learnt, but annoying. 🕵️ - This week was dominated by working on a single public-sector framework bid. I’ve really learnt about the hard work our bid team goes through and how important it is to have up-to-date company information and case studies with rich meta data. I spent several hours this week, not only helping to answer some of the more complex questions but also running around helping fill some gaps in this bid content. Equal parts boring, frustrating and educational. Lessons learnt, to-do list added to. ...

More meetings, more bids, more vets visits. 🏢 - This week started with new internal governance sessions for the management team. One commercial, one operational. Really focused on data, decisions and ensuring all senior managers are focused on the same priorities. Lots of lessons, but the biggest one being that data quality and access to data still remains an on-going concern. We made some good steps forward though and I’m looking forward to these future sessions every month. ...

Another week dominated by one project, but still time to learn a few things along the way. 👔 - Project-R2 continues at pace, with this week starting the due-diligence phase with another series of workshops. This was pretty time consuming but also very useful because it was much less sales-y than previous sessions and was more out getting specific questions answered. I feel more confident every day that this project might become a real deal. ...

The story of a week told in 30 minute increments. Flies past but with a few things to keep me motivated. 🏛️ - This week I had a bit of time working on some public sector opportunities. Starting with dipping my toe into our G-Cloud 15 submission and secondly working on a RFP for a public sector organisation. What I like about these is really how structured they are, how unusual and unique the opportunities can be vs the private sector and how surprisingly all the MSPs and GSIs that work with local and national government seem to be from the same 30-40 companies. I’ll be keeping close to these, because I still think I have a lot to learn about this sector. ...

This week has been, what I suspect is the calm before the storm. A week where I got to focus on some of my individual contributions and enabling activities and less of sales and endless meetings. 🗣️ - I started the week presenting on our H1 highlights and H2 plans at our town hall. I always appreciate this bi-annual sessions, not just because of their inherently reflective nature but because of the company-wide Q&A we get at the end. You get questions from all different contexts across the business and at all different levels of perspective from the immediate/tactical to the long-term/strategic. Great fun. ...

An old boss of mine used to talk about change like moving a boat on the ocean - you just make small waves but eventually it will turn. This week felt like one of those weeks, taking a few small actions here and there know that it will take a while to see the outcome but it’s worth doing anyway. 👔 - Project-R2, is into the next phase. My involvement has been less as a active participant this week and more as a guiding voice here and there. Thankfully, this means the time investment has been much less and I’ve really noticed the difference. After all these years I’m not sure why it still surprises me how difficult it really is to balance large projects and being a good manager. Thankfully this week a few other took up the mantle of this project, moving us into the due-diligence phase, so that I could spend more time with the team. ...

This week is the cold shower of real-life after the brief interlude of new year. Last week’s few days of relax and TV binge watching quickly forgotten by five days of back-to-back meetings and workshops. Not a lot of context switching thankfully, just a lot of work to be done on a small number of topics. Busy but not too stressful. I guess as first weeks back go, it could have been a lot worse. ...