Weeknotes

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. ...

This week I am publishing the weeknote from my phone as I lay in a field on the annual family camping trip. Monday and Tuesday were still chaotic work days but the remainder has been some much needed down time. 🔎 - Monday was spent with teams reviewing some internal processes, with a key focus on adding more automation between our security, risk, problem and incident management processes. I’m excited to see some of these things come into effect because we’re seeing improvements to both customers and our front-line engineers. ...

This week definitely felt like a slower week, but perhaps that’s just a bad comparison to last week. I managed to deep-dive into a few technical areas I don’t usually touch and also take some time to step back and think about the next steps for the portfolio. 🏛️ - A few times this week I found myself in topics about standards, compliance or regulations. This came up first as part of Project-R, but then also in two additional calls with customers. This included GDPR (and the DPDPA), PCI:DSS and the riveting handbook that is the FCA regulations. While I don’t pretend to be an expert in these areas, they come up so frequently that I think our portfolio needs to highlight them a lot more than it does today. Good insight, much reflection. ...