Weeknotes

In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet. For just a moment … 🧰 - On Monday, I had a great session with our development team working on our migration and modernisation tooling. As you can image, migrations, replacements and upgrades of software and infrastructure are something we do every day. Sometimes this is a big thing, as part of a big project but sometimes this is simply a single VM or PaaS solution. As we do this across many platforms, we’ve spent the past few years building out our own tooling for this purpose and to encode some of our many hard-won lessons. This week I got to see the latest update on this, with some great integrations with our managed service tooling, some excellent improvements to help our project managers on larger projects and better support for evidence gathering when working on projects with external auditors. As the initial sponsor of this project many years ago, I always get a kick to see it continue to make progress. ...

One crunch, one roadmap, one deep-dive. This week used all my skills and motivation to get me through to the end, but a great sense of achievement. 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 - The week started with some new management training and part of a new program being rolled out. This wouldn’t normally be something of note, as regular management training, be that internal or external is just business-as-usual but in this case it was notable because unlike much of the previous training I have been a part of, this is a new program taking all managers though start HR policies, but is delivered by specialist employment lawyers. What I really liked about this was it took was is typically very stale content and brought it to life in terms of discussions about edge-cases, particular scenarios and what has been learnt from the lawyers experience of employment tribunals and mistakes made by other organisations. While I’m very familiar with our policies, I still learnt a lot from this. ...

This week has been about old friends, old projects and live editing. 👥 - Like bookends to my week I got to have a couple of really good conversations this week with some ex-colleagues this week. The first occurring on Tuesday, with someone whom I’m hoping will come back and work with us (but an honest conversation not a sales pitch). The second with one of my favourite ex-colleagues who’s been a bit of a management mentor to me over this years. This was one of our monthly informal catch-ups and after the week of boredom and frustration he certainly helped me enter the week in a positive mood. ...

Yo Dawg! I heard you like milestones … 🛠️ Spent another day in London, this time for a multi-hour workshop with a large customer in the insurance industry. Not calling it too early but this one might be another one of those that I end up talking about in future weeknotes with my usual Project- prefix. It was a good session, talking about everything from Cloud, workplace functionality, remote working, digital apps and legacy problems. Hopefully gave lots of value but as always cam away with plenty of thing about. It was good to spent a day thinking about a new customer rather than having my head buried in the usual one. ...

Contracts, Damned Contracts and SLAs … 📝 This weeks side quest involved reviewing SLAs. This included identifying gaps, looking at improvements but more critically, doing a lot of scenario planning of where multiple SLAs could compound upon each other. I’ve added a note to write some of this up as a blog post in the next few weeks. 📜 This weeks Project-R update is the long slog of legal back and forth, hunting down potential issues and risks (what we would call bugs - but I’ve come to refer to as Easter eggs), they’ll likely be more of this for a few weeks. As I’m learning more about the legal writing process I’m building up a small GPT prompt to act as my self reviewer and to document the guardrails. I’ll definitely be doing more of this, both on this project but also on a couple more large ones we have in the pipeline, so having something like this to help others will be time well spent. ...

More words, more strategy, more services … 🏛️ Another day in London, this time to spend some time talking about org structure and operating models. Putting my strategy hat on for a little while. In a growing business with growing teams sometimes you have to step away from the operational day to day and spend some time discussing the pinch points of your organisation. Often things grow and move organically in an engineering org and often customer needs will move faster than any structure can reposition itself. This week we took some time to try and think 2 or 3 steps ahead about where we want to be and what an org would look like if we got there. It was a conversation that was sometimes awkward, sometimes surprising but definitely fun and very useful but the sort of thing that you can’t do unless you have a close team that trusts each other. ...

More words, more films, more questions … 📜 Project-R continues to extract words from my brain like silvery strands from a Harry Potter memory charm. This week was a quick 10k words of contractual text describing our managed services. Definitions, obligations, we will do this, we may do this, we require you to do this other thing from time to time. I don’t know how lawyers do this every day - exhausting. Having said that I did spend some time writing a couple of use AI prompts, one which reviews my work and the other which drafts definitions for me. Not perfect to useful and certainly re-usable. ...

A week of more paperwork but boosted by an all-too-brief office visit. 📜 Project-R continues to fill my week, I’m coming to terms with the fact at this project is going to be one projects upon which many other improvements hang-off from. I guess it’s sort of like having a development branch in your GitHub repository, where lots of stuff happens every day and then you cherry-pick the best bits for your main branch (that being the rest of the business in this very stretched analogy). Well, this week’s Project-R side-quest has been working on services descriptions - nothing new but making sure any relevant service descriptions are on the latest templates, any that have pending updates are completed and that Project-R get the best versions of these things included. ...

📜 - With Project-R being a focus of last year, it continues at full steam this week with me supporting contracting and reviewing paperwork. As a technologist, you might think that spending my time on legal paperwork would be on the list of worst things I have to do, in fact it’s quite the opposite. It’s one of those times when you have to be really clear about what you do - especially if you’re having to define technical terms for non-technical folks. I have also found that this is the type of process where any gaps in services or pre-conceived assumptions really comes to the forefront so I always find this an excellent opportunity to test out really being able to define commitments and value and learn some things along the way. ...

Well the first week of the new year is thankfully a bit of a slow one with only two days back at work (almost everyone else off) and three days for some goal setting and TV binge watching. 🧹 - The start of the year, is one of those time when it feels appropriate to do a bit of a clean up. Perhaps it’s due to the large volume of rubbish from Christmas but it encourages me to throw away other things unused and to deep clean rooms to make space. There is also a psychological element that means a clean space puts you in the right head space to start the new year. ...