Weeknotes

It’s been a year! I’ve managed to keep up this little weeknote habit for 52 weeks. For something that I thought would probably last a couple of months and then get deleted, I’m pretty happy with myself that I’ve got this far. There have been a few things I’ve learnt from this process, the main thing being is that there is quite a bit of repetition week-to-week because the projects and initiatives I work on typically take a lot longer than initially expected - planning fallacy right there! Anyway, I’m still enjoying writing these even if it’s only me that’s reading and reflecting on them. ...

A quick one this week and not my usual weeknote. I spent this week in on a work trip to Chamonix, a seasonal work event that used to take place every year but hadn’t been done since 2019 and has now been brought back. This is the time of year when I spend the most time with my peers from other countries and I value every second of it. ...

This week had some good news and the I had so many meetings and ad-hoc calls I couldn’t really tell you what day it was. Overall though this week is a quick weeknote as there was only a couple of key things really going on this week. 🚌 - Got verbal confirmation from the CEO that Project-R is going ahead. This meant the week was full of calls preparing everyone for what’s to come, introducing people to the project who haven’t been involving and getting engineering assigned to the engagement. With a project of this size this also meant ensuring everyone was calm, despite the challenges, and hopefully they fed off my confidence. ...

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. ...