Weeknotes

Well this week has felt like a continuation of last week (more like one long week with no obvious separation), and I’m been very much focusing on some changes to increase my productivity, and thinking more about how much I really value writing and I should do it more. What I’ve been doing I’ve been writing down the stuff I do for a while, in scribbled books, 1:1 notes or brag documents. As an alternative, this week I have started doing daily notes in Obsidian. Like many other I use a bit of a template for this, but it’s not too complicated. For obvious reasons, unlike weeknotes I won’t be posting my daily notes anywhere public but it does come in handy when taking the time to reflect on the week for these posts. ...

This week has overall been a pretty good week, the weather has been great. I feel like I’ve got a lot of tasks closed off and I’ve spent time in the office. What I’ve been doing This week has been about scaling and automation. Working with different team from portfolio, delivery and managed services to work through the details of some small adjustments to improve how we can deliver more to customers faster aka scale. I’ve also been going into more depth on our levels of automation, especially in the dark corners when automation is not systems but scripts. Trying to pull it all together into one solution. ...

Writing lots and lots of internal content again this week, supporting people to think bigger and reading some interesting articles. What I’ve been doing This week has mostly been about thinking about what a modern managed service looks like. What does an outsource ITIL managed service need to look like? How pro-active? What do the commitments and outputs need to look like? How does it need to “feel” in 2024. This has all meant lots of conversation, lots of writing and lots of supporting people to think outside of their comfort zone. ...

This week I’ve been doing my best impression of a technical writer and other things have sort of fallen the way side. On a slight side note, this is the first week note I’m using working copy on my phone, it’s taken longer but it’s allowed me to write in smaller fragments during the week, so I think it might result in better content if I can keep it up. ...

This week was about talking to customers and planning roadmaps - exciting, sometimes frustrating but always motivating. What I’ve been doing Working through our product roadmaps for the next year - making sure all different product areas fit together nicely. Also balancing that with talking to some of our customers who have had or are having problems with us to make sure we can effectively deliver what we currently sell before taking on newer shinier things. Also bids (gotta love enterprise sales) which means a few weeks of content discovery, content writing and asking questions like “can we?” and “should we?”. ...

Writing, so much writing. I did an rough estimate before writing this and I think I easily written more than 10k words this week - the size of the average thesis. I love writing (obviously) but technical writing is certainly something of a craft that I always underestimate until having to do it. What I’ve been doing Discussing with a customer about how to move off an ancient k8s cluster deployed on AWS EC2 with KOps - everyone knows I love a bit of technical archaeology. On the other end of the spectrum I have been working on writing about all the details of application support for random (industry specific) applications and how to manage them in a modern way. Fun week all round really :) ...

I’ve caught the first of what is usually several seasonal bugs this week. Been working, but mostly from the sofa. Interesting stuff happened this week, but it was interspersed with coughing. What I’ve been doing I’m been exploring new services. Can’t talk much about them publicly here, but putting my PM hat on for a little while and working with engineers on what some new services look like it always something I enjoy doing. ...

This week as been more real-world customer problems, more research and just really enjoying the pace of things again. What I’ve been doing More customers, more deals. Still surprising that after all these years there are still folks out there who haven’t migrated to the cloud yet. There are also so many organisations that find themselves adrift for support when a bad exit from an exiting outsourcer occurs. This is my in my 7 powers blog post this month I still think customer experience is a massive problem in our industry and one that can be a competitive advantage. ...

This week felt a bit manic work-wise but in a good way. Back to feeling useful again. What I’ve been doing I’m been talking to customers again, which is great. It’s been over a year since I’ve really been on the front line and I’ve forgotten how much I love talking to customers about their real problems. 3 customers this week and lots of follow-up calls with engineers, product managers and sales folk to really paint a picture about what’s working and what isn’t. Also some time to write a bit of code to help some engineers better price things and I feel like this is my happy place again. ...

This week as been a mixed emotions week. Sadness with departing collogues but also a week of positive productivity. What I’ve been doing Writing scripts to take inventory of customer environments. Financial modelling. All feels very 2021. What I’ve been thinking about Habits - and what’s my next nudge? After reading the famous Atomic Habbits I periodically make small adjustments to my daily routines to add in new things I want to do. Most of the time this is things that take me 10-20 minutes a day, like Duolingo or changing my breakfast, other times this is bigger things like buying a treadmill. I’m starting to think about what’s list of small changes I want to do and over what time frame. More on this in future weeknotes I think. ...