Weeknotes

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. ...

Some weeks there isn’t a theme, just a grab bag of vaguely interesting stuff happens … ⭐ - My appraisal. If you’ve read any of my blogs or weeknotes, you’ll know I’m pretty good at being reflective. I think I generally have a pretty fair and balanced view of myself and my performance so I wasn’t really expecting too much out of my appraisal. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a more positive response than I had judged myself again - which was a nice mid-week boost. I feel I’ve worked pretty hard this year on a number of professional and personal fronts and it was nice to have that acknowledged. Next onto goals. ...

Training, reflecting, planning, nurturing … 🦩 - Sales training. One day in the London office and one day in the Leeds office. Working with out sales teams on how to sell our cloud portfolio as a solution sell alongside other portfolio areas. Also, reviewing some competitors and some example sales scenarios. I always enjoy doing these sorts of things because it gives me a temperature check for our sales teams and I always get new questions and sometimes things I hadn’t considered. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...