Weeknotes

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

“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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...