Weeknotes

This week has been about cloud management from first principles - with both my engineering and my portfolio hat’s on. Reviewing SLAs, OLAs and standards as part of Project-R - great and valid questions coming out of this process. Identifying and filling in gaps and inconsistencies where I find them. Lots of discussions and a little way off from implementing the changes but being customer-driven is exactly how you enhance your services for the better so this has been a great exercise. SLAs in particular can get very complicated, very quickly especially when it comes to compound SLAs and overlapping SLAs. I’ve added this to my blog queue because there is definitely more to write on this topic. ...

I was on leave again this week and I had planned to spend it doing all the domestic activities that required action but despite a few odd jobs, mostly got distracted by other family activities. We’re spending some time focusing on the house because we’re thinking about moving next year. We’ve lived where we are for almost 10 years now, a lot has happened here and we both feel it’s time for a change. Our house currently just sits outside of the town (5 mins drive) and we’re looking to move back into the country and get the horses living on our own land. A big ambition and probably typical for the stage of our lives we’re in. ...

This week was the first of two weeks of well earned rest. You’ll see from the past few weeknotes that I’ve been spending a lot of time working with one particularly large new potential customer. I love doing this, it stretches me personally, makes me re-validate assumptions and think from a customer’s point of view. Despite my excitement for this time of work, it can take it’s toll mentally, so I’m glad to have the time off. ...

This week was a whirlwind of code and calls. Where did the week go? I feel like I was on auto-pilot until at least Thursday. Some interesting stuff though. The consistent theme of this week has been death by 30m call. I feel like I’m spoken to most people in our organisation at some point this week on everything from Project-R, to vendors and portfolio to tech practices and managed services. While exhausting, and this happens to time-to-time, on reflection it feels satisfying to have helped a large number of people. ...

This week was Sessions 6,7, and 8 of Project-R and some more portfolio planning and handling a customer business issue. Discussions have started about introducing the Digital Apps portfolio from the wider group into the UK. We’ve been doing everything from developing bespoke applications, modernizing applications onto new technology or building integrations and bots. This is all something that I want to bring to our UK customers and I’ve very excited to start working more in this space. Lots and lots more to come on this topic. ...

This week was a little more varied that I was expecting it to be - in a good way. A few new things to keep me motivated with Project-R continues on. Week started with a demo of Control Monkey this a nice tool, from the founder of Spot.io and helps manage large Terraform environments. Managing Terraform at the scale of an MSP, with multiple customers, multiple repositories and multiple Terraform versions is the type of problem where only a dedicated tool will do. I look forward to playing with this more - updates to come. ...

This week has been with 3-days in London, 2 for work and 1 for pleasure. Started the week on Project-R content, more questions, more content to write. 1st day in London presenting to sales on the latest Q2 cloud offerings. It’s amazing just how many opportunities there are and how many customers still haven’t migrated or have migrated and are still running their cloud environment like an old datacenter. I love these types of sessions because I get some fresh perspectives and great questions. ...

Ok, well this week feels like it’s been about one thing - the massive RFP. This is definitely going to weeks (if not months), from now on for the sake of clarity I’ll be referring to this as Project-R. I can’t say much else about it at this stage, so this weeknote is going to be a short one. My entire week was mostly spent on Project-R. Collaborating with engineers, solutions architects, managed services and starting to write down lots and lots of content. ...

This week was one of those week that really didn’t go to plan. I was intending to spend a bit more time with the portfolio team but instead we got a very large RFP out of no where and a serious incident for one of our most high-profile customers - fun times. Got started on one of the largest RFPs I’ve seen to-date. Very long, very detailed, it look me a few hours to read before even being able to think about responses. I think this one is going take a lot of time over the next few weeks. ...

This week as been a bit all over the place and I’m not really sure where it’s gone. Getting back into work mode slowly and socialising more than expected. Admin and killing off things This week, work has mostly been a lot admin-y type work with the unfortunate complexity of being just outside of the capabilities of our internal GPT instance. Given that some of this is mind-numbingly boring, I’ve been taking my usual tactic of loud music in the background to keep me motivated - I should probably stick all this into a playlist to share for people in the same situation. ...