Weeknotes

A week of two halves for sure. One of those weeks where you look back and go “wait, did that just happen?” 🇦🇪 - The most of this week was all about the Dubai FinTech Summit. I flew out on Sunday for this event we were sponsoring to talk to people on our stand. I was also there to do some panel discussions, community interviews and some dinners with some customers. I’d been preparing for a week for this but I really wasn’t prepared for the experience. Dubai is like nothing else - in culture, in opportunity, in inspiration. Landed home on Wednesday and I’ll be thinking about and discussing this for weeks to come. I’ll be writing up a specific blog post on this shortly. Edit: (19-Apr-2025) I have added the post on this event here ...

Where did this week go? A mixed bag of all sorts and then it was the weekend. 🪢 - Had all the team leaders for tech practice, together F2F this week. It was brief but it’s nice to see everyone together discussing employee feedback and plans for the next FY. 💡 - This week I started a series of career coaching sessions with a colleague who feels they are in a bit of rut. This is my opportunity to expand on my coaching experience, using existing tools and techniques from my own coaching experience. I’m not often on this side of the coaching table in such a formal/structured manner. On this occasion I’ll get to explore if this is something I want to do more of in my career all the while helping someone else with theirs. 🧹 - Project R ticks along, all while doing its best to fill my calendar. This week was a lot of running around the edges, dealing with small internal projects, providing clarity of the scope and potential changes and monitoring how well the discovery process is progressing. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

New people, new questions, new inspiration … 🚸 - Started the week with an introduction session with our new work experience folks. Giving a “this is what we do” presentation but without all the industry-speak was quite refreshing. The questions I got were inspiring and I really got a kick of out talking to these teenagers at the start of their journey. I really must do this more. 🟢 - We’re got a few batches of new joiners across the business over the next few weeks and I’ve been involved in their inductions. Presenting what the technology teams do is one thing, but I also got lots of general business questions which was fun. I don’t think I ever get bored of these types of things. While I hope our new joiners get some useful knowledge, I also find that I get a good sense check of the rest of our process based upon the types of questions that get asked. ⛯ - Starting a very specific set of activities on putting together our FY26 roadmap. This includes all elements, proposition, product and lifecycle management. This week I had a deep-dive session on proposition - that are the big bets we’re going to make, what product bundling and what verticals we’re targeting and why. Good conversation and useful output that customers will get to see at the end of the month. 🏉 - The weekend is all about U12 Rugby - a full weekend away tour. Very loud, very busy, very fun. Quality family time. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

I’ve been off this week for some R&R and to focus on a bit of house admin. So it will be a light weeknote this week. 🏠 - Spent some time focused on tidying the house, boxing things to move into storage and throwing things into a hired skip. Preparing the house ready to put onto the market. We’ve lived here for 8 years now so we’re accumulated a lot. It will take longer than a week but it’s a good start. 📚 - I’ve also been reading a lot this week. That included not only catching up on a lot of articles but also reading some of the longer white papers I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve also put a couple of magazines into my rotation which has been refreshing. I’ve been pretty bad at my fiction reading the past few months so I’ve spent some time catching up on that and I’m adding it to the stats part of the weeknotes so see how I get on. 📊 - This weeks stats: ...

Half a working week this week, only Mon-Wed but it didn’t feel any less busy. This week was mostly about supporting our tech practice leaders in thinking about their roadmaps for the new year. I’ve been working on roadmaps and strategy for a while now and over the next year the real task is to delegate more of this work and support the tech practice leaders and their corresponding product managers to really take more ownership and accountability for the direction. ...

This week has been a little calmer than previous weeks, it’s given me time to focus on a slider wider range of topics that I have been able to previously. Now that I’m into year 2 of weeknotes, I am also thinking about a couple of additions of the next few weeks. 📓 - I’ve noticed that writing these weeknotes week after week acts a bit like an anonymous accountability buddy where I am encouraged throughout the week to take a little note of the meaningful things I did so that I can write them up at the end. This means I am thinking about a few other things that I might want to include here in the future: what I am listening to, what games I am playing, my health stats from the week. I’m not sure exactly when or where these will fit in but I am certainly thinking about adding more detail over time. 🧰 - The first thing on my list for the week has been going deep on the topic of legacy OS automation. We’ve got a couple of customer engagements at the moment where there is a diverse range of end-of-support operating systems that need to be upgraded. Depending on the age, some of these are not trivial to automate and upgrade. As we’ve been doing this for a while, we have lot of pockets of good information and scripts available but we’re now at a point where this need to be brought together and tested. I spent this week coming up with a plan for this. This was more exciting for me to work on that it might be for others because I love dealing with the heritage things. ➰ - I got my first demo of Loopio that we’ll be rolling out to support our bid team. This is great and another way for us to centralise our knowledge and speed up our customer responses. I’m also expecting gaps to appear that I can work with our technical leaders to fill. 💬 - I got asked to write proposals for a couple of talks this week for events we’re sponsoring. Having not spoken in public for a while this was a refreshing change of case. One for an iGaming event in London and anther for a FinTech event in Dubai. AI and cyber security are both the topics of the day here. The challenge as always is not the technical topic but making it something relevant to the industry vertical and audience there rather than something generic. Well, I’ve had some good ideas and hopefully they think so too. 💵 - An odd little note on Azure billing this week - we’re expanding to be a indirect partner in the US (hopefully direct partner soon after) and it’s been a lot more complicated than it should have been - literally days. Combinations of getting the right tenancy, the right office address, proving domain ownership and many tickets to Microsoft. We’re only doing this because we have a few international customers who want to transact in the US as opposed to any significant plans for US expansion - but it was good to see it happen anyway. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

Birthday week, time in front of the camera and thinking about UX. 🌀 - Spent some time this week thinking through some requirements for our customer facing portals. It’s part of my wider strategy to really enhance this customer interaction point while also maintaining a human feel for the service. This week has been filtering out ideas of functionality being developed across the business and how that might look and feel when presented to the customer in an integrated way. I don’t put my BA/Product manager/design hats on often but when I do, it is something I enjoy. ...

It’s been a year! I’ve managed to keep up this little weeknote habit for 52 weeks. For something that I thought would probably last a couple of months and then get deleted, I’m pretty happy with myself that I’ve got this far. There have been a few things I’ve learnt from this process, the main thing being is that there is quite a bit of repetition week-to-week because the projects and initiatives I work on typically take a lot longer than initially expected - planning fallacy right there! Anyway, I’m still enjoying writing these even if it’s only me that’s reading and reflecting on them. ...

A quick one this week and not my usual weeknote. I spent this week in on a work trip to Chamonix, a seasonal work event that used to take place every year but hadn’t been done since 2019 and has now been brought back. This is the time of year when I spend the most time with my peers from other countries and I value every second of it. 🎿 - The days are spent skiing in the morning, followed by workshops and other team-based activities until the late evening. Almost every minute of the day, from breakfast time, taxi transfers and workshop agendas is tightly organised, and with 30 people there that is somewhat of a miracle. I came back dehydrated with aches, pains and bruises but with a long list of ideas and a schedule of other sessions to work through upon my return. ...

This week had some good news and the I had so many meetings and ad-hoc calls I couldn’t really tell you what day it was. Overall though this week is a quick weeknote as there was only a couple of key things really going on this week. 🚌 - Got verbal confirmation from the CEO that Project-R is going ahead. This meant the week was full of calls preparing everyone for what’s to come, introducing people to the project who haven’t been involving and getting engineering assigned to the engagement. With a project of this size this also meant ensuring everyone was calm, despite the challenges, and hopefully they fed off my confidence. ⚙️ - Had come great conversations with our internal systems teams this week. I never forget how important it is for our internal systems to be treated in the same way as our customer projects, so I had some roadmap conversations with each of the internal systems teams this week about improving CX, better integration and adding some functionality that’s going to have a massive impact on the engineering experience for delivering Project-R. This includes improvements to our CMDB, our migration tooling and our customer portal. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...