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. ...
This week has been a tough one. Busy, complicated, lots of things going on. With Project-R2 and what was then the pending acquisition of 6DG, I knew July was going to be a crunch time month and it’s turning out to be just that. This week was been a week of 12-hours days, fuelled by coffee and adrenalin. I have a certain set of skills like consuming content fast, holding lots of context in my head and producing content quickly that make me useful for these sort of periods but it can only occur in short bursts and I’m thankful for the pre-booked leave I have coming up at the beginning of August. ...
This week was: wow. Long hours, multiple projects, like one long day. But damn it was exciting. 🔵 - This week was defined by the announcement that Claranet has acquired Six Degrees . I’ve been involved in this one for months, spent quite a bit of time on the technical due diligence and it’s been frustrating to keep that out my these weeknotes - but hey! that’s why we have NDAs. The acquisition has meant that this week has been meetings with managers and my team. Introduction calls me new 6DG team members and the start of a new discovery period. Technical due-diligence is one thing - you find out about the scale, the products, the tools and the customers but what you don’t find out about what any of those actually “feel” like. Are there customers that are more difficult than others? Are they tools and systems that engineers love or hate? Are their products are services that are difficult to deliver? My next two weeks will involve actually talking to any many engineers and sales people as I can to get the answers to these questions. So just like some of the discovery I’ve been doing with Project-R2, 6DG discovery will mean lots of calls, lots of reading documents and lots of poking around systems. Importantly, this period is not the first stage of an integration plan but the stage that you use the gather enough information to build one. No upfront plans here - listen, learn and adapt accordingly. ...
Typically upon review of a week there are two or three items that really stand out to reflect back on, however this week was all about Project-R2. In slightly unusual circumstances, paused my many other roles and donned by consulting hat once more to help this project move along. Project-R2 is in that exciting discovery phrase where we’re doing lots of meeting, workshops, reading content and accessing systems - essentially, this is looking under every possible rock for things we need to know for the next stage of the project, things that might put risk to that outcome and inevitably a long list of things that need fixing at some point in the future. For some this stage can be a long drag of emotional labour as you read large amounts of content, ask awkward questions and have the deal with the emotions and politics of the organisations involved. To be honest, for me, this was an exciting week. It’s not often I get to play this role any more I’m enjoying getting to poke around into something brand new. I suppose the difference on this occasion is that I have a bit more experience and I am coming within some secondary objectives: what activities need to be done that we might struggle with and activities will be have to do that are reusable capabilities for other customers. ...
This week is very much defined by Project-R2. There are certainly lots of other things happening around the edges, but this project dominates at the moment. I’m not actually all that bothered by that, it’s a customer where they are investing in the right things, have money to spend and are pushing us in all the right directions to be better. Exhausting but exciting stuff. 🏹 - The week started with an all-day set of on-site workshops the Project-R2 customer and project team. A kick-off for them (we’d had our internal one a few weeks before) and some workshops on additional projects and innovation. The conversations were really rich and in-depth. Migrations, security improvements, AI roll-outs and application development. If Project-R2 wasn’t big enough on it’s own already there was a small mountain of innovation to do and plenty of areas for me to have some further internal conversations about. I came away enthused by the possibilities. The day closed out with a nice roof-top dinner and drinks with the team overlooking the impressive views of central London - despite having worked here for most of my career, the awe from this place is never lost on me. ...
I’m not sure I could say there was a consistent theme of this week. The new FY is just around the corner and there is a lot of planning for that, not just financially but in planning for changes, for scale and what happens if all our chickens come to roost at the same time. 🤖 - The week started with the monthly management meetings. The usual topics were covered by one standout part of the discussion of how we scale AI across the business. We spent enough time now on the security, on the skills, on the scenarios. We now just need start using it deeper into the day to day of the organisation. This means not just giving people licenses and a bit of training but also educating people about all the options available. Example: when to use a skill vs an agent vs traditional automation vs real software. There are some blurred lines there for sure, but we want to make sure we’re not just vibe coding our way to a future mess. ...