Weeknotes

This week was a fast-paced, somewhat stressful week, much of which is a roll-over from work of previous weeks - so it’s a short update this week. 🏎️ - Project-R2 continues at high speed, with the next batch of projects landing in the queue and all of this before we’ve made any of our own recommendations. Some of these are genuinely interesting - many of which with a security lens but deeply focused on engineering smarter and faster. There will certainly be a few new Claranet portfolio services that emerge from this work over time. Project-R2 can be stressful at times, and certainly at the moment it feels like a game of who can scale fastest and who’s going to blink first. I’ve not blinked yet. ...

2 days in London, one day with hardly any meetings at all and a todo list that’s getting longer by the day. 👨🏻‍💼 - Monday started with the usual monthly management meeting. Perhaps the most surprising aspect was the time was spent going deeper on fewer topics. This was due to the dual circumstances of some very pressing operational and financial issues to address combined with the fact that Project-R2 and the 6DG acquisition have resulted in many other initiatives being put on ice. Perhaps it was really a good show of agility of the management team. ...

With the bank holiday Monday, this week was one of those compressed 4-day weeks where everything seems to go in a flash. I’ve always been a silent advocate for the idea of a 4-day week, but most implementations I’ve seen take the approach of doing the same hours in a compressed period. I think I’ve come to realise that I don’t think this is something I could do, I don’t think I’ve got the energy for it and I don’t think it actually gives you the break you think it might. I suspect all it achieves is to make the weeks fly past even quicker. Anyway, that’s a rant for another day. This week, being a little shorter, just means that my focus was really on Project-R2, but as the light at the end of that tunnel draws closer so does the next one appear on the horizon. ...

Some weeks are peppered with small meetings like stand-ups and update calls - this wasn’t one of those weeks. This week I spent a day with a customer and the remaining days in longer 60-90 minute meetings. It was a refreshing change of pace. 🏘️ - Tuesday was a visit to a small market to town to spend four hours with another 6DG customer. Understanding their business, their 2027 strategy and what’s possible to support them with. As another financial services customer, this continues to expand my knowledge and understanding of the specific needs of this vertical and importantly the different requirements of retail banks, investment banks, insurance, payment providers and specialist finance operators. This particular customer was transitioning to AWS, so it was particularly important to me. ...

This week should have been a stressful week, as we come close to our first Project-R2 deadline, but for some reason it didn’t. The pressure felt less and I felt like a little bit more time to focus on me. Perhaps it’s a chicken-and-egg situation and spending a little more time on me has reduced my stress. Who knows, but anyway it’s been a good week with it’s usual amount of interesting titbits that are teasing for a deep-dive. ...

The first half of the week I was on the annual family camping trip and for the first time, not actually looking at my email of teams messages while on leave. This meant that Wednesday hit me like a bus, with hundreds of emails and messages and a back-to-back day of meetings. A few escalations into the mix was the real cherry on the cake. Thankfully by Friday, I’d caught up and my stress levels much reduced. My overall mood remains positive. ...

This week as bit of short week as Thursday and Friday I was on leave, but there were a couple of interesting conversations and customer meetings, which made a refreshing change and not a typical week. 👓 - On Wednesday I had the pleasure of meeting two 6DG financial services customers. It seems I’m doing a lot more with customers in the financial services sector these days but both of these companies were very different and operated aspect of FSI that I had not come across yet. This was useful, not only so I can understand the nature of the existing relationships but also because it gave me an excuse to learn something new about the industries these companies work in and do some research as well as listening to them talk about their challenges. Travelling across London in the heat to meet each of these customers was not ideal, but I’m starting to enjoy these F2F meetings the more I get to do them. ...

This week has been another week where I donned my consulting hat for Project-R2. There was honestly little else, a smattering of 1:1s and admin, but otherwise full-time R2. ⚙️ - I had a really good conversation with week with the R2 team about CMDB, quality score and it’s relationship with assessment management and vendor management. These are topics I’ve certainly spent quite a bit of time on over the years and areas where I know organisations typically always have improvements to make (our organisation included), so it was good to think about this again. As has been the case a lot recently on R2, I come away with lots of notes, actions, and things to think about more deeply, not just for R2 but for all the other customers I work with also. ...

Another week of customer meetings and face-to-face meetings. This week was a week of scribbled notes, email drafts and more added tasks on my planner boards than tasks completed - a personal pipeline development week if you will. Well, enough to keep me a busy for a few more weeks at least. 🐦‍🔥 - Tuesday was another 6DG customer meeting, this week in the city of Coventry. While there as part of my “introductions” series of customer meetings, this was certainly more of the listen-and-learn variety than normal. A customer with a slightly unusual context and good conversations about IaC for private cloud, Hyper-V and Azure Local. Definitely some ideas to stew on over the coming weeks. ...

A week that has flown by so fast my feet barely had chance to touch the ground. With two long days in the office and back-to-back meetings on most days, I found myself in the garden re-grounding myself and collapsing into my bed and then the week was over. Slightly less stressful than the previous week but certainly no less busy and some really good conversions. 🤝🏻 - After a introductions calls last week, this week I started doing face-to-face meetings with a few of the new 6DG folks. This was a great opportunity to deep-dive on the day-to-day and operational requirements of this new business, to understand each persons role and context and to start building relationships. ...