Weeknotes

This week as been a week that has flown by in a series of small meetings and todo list items. I have been operating at about 40% for most of the week as I continue to fight off the seasonal cold (yes, I should take some sick days but you know I won’t because I still have itches to scratch). 🛝 - This week has been definitely been about all the small things (say it ain’t so!). I don’t just mean lots of tiny 15 minute meetings or 5 minute emails to fire off, but I mean that it’s been a week where the mistakes have been small but also the wins. These days I’m mostly involved in the larger projects and these can suffer with what I call “death by a thousand cuts” - a project that doesn’t fail in some big bang catastrophe but very slowly over time due to lots of tiny mistakes. A project can go from profitable to unprofitable like a leaky kitchen tap that no one really notices. The flip side to this is “growth by a thousand steps” - tweak a agent, improve a process, add an automated business rule. These things on their are often forgettable improvements, easily missed by focusing on the next thing. Well this week has had plenty of both of these extremes - I now have a long list. ...

Another week with an office visit and another week where I feel connected to all corners of the business. However I ended the week with whatever bug is doing the rounds 😷 📈 - Another week with a big emphasis on sales. A combination of account planning, renewals and a few roadmap conversations with customers meant that overall it felt engaging, like we had some exciting plans and that some of our customers will continue to push us. ...

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. ...

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. ...

If I was to title this week’s weeknote it would be something like “Weeknote 77 - Wow! 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...