Weeknotes

This week was one of low-level frustration as I run around gather information and then fighting with tools to improve my day-to-day workflow. Lots learnt, but annoying. 🕵️ - This week was dominated by working on a single public-sector framework bid. I’ve really learnt about the hard work our bid team goes through and how important it is to have up-to-date company information and case studies with rich meta data. I spent several hours this week, not only helping to answer some of the more complex questions but also running around helping fill some gaps in this bid content. Euqal parts boring, frustrating and educational. Lessons learnt, todo list added to. 🗃️ - I got to shadow a meeting this week between a customer and some of my german collegues talking about SAP. This is such a huge and specialist area and it was great to start at the beginning, see how our services are presented to customers so that I can work backwards, dig into the technical details and learn lots along the way. I’m coming across SAP more and more as I work with larger customers so this was a good starting point. 🤖 - Like everyone these days I am viewing every tasks I perform in my role with the simple question - could this be automated and could AI do it? I have a few different AI tools avaliable to me, but as a manager the path of least resistance for a number of tasks is Microsoft Copilot. I spent more time than I should have this week with Copilot Studio trying to automate a series of tasks. I am not finished and I am left full of rage for this. There might even be a “I hate Copilot” blog post coming soon. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

More meetings, more bids, more vets visits. 🏢 - This week started with new internal governance sessions for the management team. One commerical, one opperational. Really focused on data, decisions and ensuring all senior managers are focused on the same priorities. Lots of lessons, but the biggest one being that data quality and access to data still remains an on-going concern. We made some good steps forward though and I’m looking forward to these future sessions every month. 🧘 - I am spending more time with our pre-sales folks with 1:1s to gather information on how to improve our pre-sales experience. Pre-sales is one of the first interactions customer have with us and the ease and speed of these first interactions can make or break a relationship. There is also the goal to make pre-sales more efficient for the company and giving the pre-sales folks the right tools which will speed up customer acquision time. 💸 - I read four large RFI bid documents this week. This takes time, even with AI (because details matter) but it’s also exciting. I look out for what I call “easter eggs” - the things that are unusual, difficult or require more discussion. Large oppertunities are the life blood of the business and can be a bit boring after a while, so I enjoy digging into one or two that have something we can learn from. 🐾 - My large dog had her surgery this week so some chaos has ensued, both practically and in the calendar - but all is well in the end. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Another week dominated by one project, but still time to learn a few thigns along the way. 👔 - Project-R2 continues at pace, with this week starting the due-dilligence phase with another series of workshops. This was pretty time consuming but also very useful because it was much less sales-y than previous sessions and was more out getting specific questions answered. I feel more confident every day that this project might become a real deal. 🏷️ - I spent quite a bit of time this week with our product, architect and finance teams planning the next interations of our service pricing. Lots and lots of edge cases and scenario-based planning. We’re not done this in a while and we’ve had lots of example of difficult situations that we need to learn from in how we model. 🕴️ - This week I learnt about the phrase “Total Experience (TX)” the combination of UX, DX and EX to provide wholistic customer outcomes. It has sparked so many ideas and something I want to write more about. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

The story of a week told in 30 minuite increments. Flies past but with a few things to keep me motivated. 🏛️ - This week I had a bit of time working on some public sector oppertunities. Starting with dipping my toe into our G-Cloud 15 submission and secondly working on a RFP for a public sector organisation. What I like about these is really how structured they are, how unusual and unique the oppertuntities can be vs the private sector and how surprisingly all the MSPs and GSIs that work with local and national government seem to be from the same 30-40 companies. I’ll be keeping close to these, because I still think I have a lot to learn about this sector. 🌧️ - I spent some time working on our AWS strategy. Our relationship with AWS has always been a rocky one, sometimes loved, sometimes ignored. This week’s redundancies also haven’t helped, having an impact on the partner organisation and thus sales. Despite that, I need to be customer focused and not AWS focused, so we started discussing the plan for better supporting customers with AWS. Lots of plans a foot, and a big focus on security and resliance - so let’s see that happens this time around. 🚀 - I’ve been building and investing in internal tools at Claranet for many years now, ensuring that both our engineering and customer experience continue to improve. In 2025, we built lots of features into the platform to support assessments, migrations and managed services, but not all customers got the benefit of that. This week I started speaking with the team about the programme of work to roll out all these features to all of our customers. It’s a huge piece of work but I want to ensure that the future is indeed evenly distrubuted. 🐾 - My bank balance has taken a bit of beating this week due to vet visits for the large dog and having my roof repaired. Turns out domestic life was also as busy as my work life this week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week has been, what I suspect is the calm before the storm. A week where I got to focus on some of my individual contributions and enabling activities and less of sales and endless meetings. 🗣️ - I started the week presenting on our H1 highlights and H2 plans at our Townhall. I always appreciate this bi-annual sessions, not just because of their inheritently reflective nature but because of the company-wide Q&A we get at the end. You get questions from all different contexts across the business and at all different levels of perspective from the immediate/tactical to the long-term/strategic. Great fun. 🏢 - In my team call this week, I had to remind my team that it’s ok to just say “this was as business-as-usual week”. Sometimes team meetings can get a bit performative and people feel the need to justify all the things they have done that week to everyone else. I’ve definitly been in teams where that is the case. Given this is only the third time I’ve had a team meeting with my new team I wanted to reset the tone and expectation that it’s ok to say it’s just been a week of getting on with it. Not every week is has something criticial, something on fire, something shiny or interesting. I want us to spend the time talking about the important stuff and trust that each of them will do the rest without having to update me or the rest of the team on it. I do however want to provide systems and reporting to allow anyone in the team (managers or otherwise) to dip into the detail whenever they want. ⌨️ - The remainder of my week was a lot of focus blocks in my calander, working on strategy, new portfolio updates and some AI work. There were one-or-two specific conversations happening to support this work but it was good to just spend some time writing things down, reading comments and collaborating on the type of content that gives everyone focus and direction. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

An old boss of mine used to talk about change like moving a boat on the ocaean - you just make small waves but eventually it will turn. This week felt like one of those weeks, taking a few small actions here and there know that it will take a while to see the outcome but it’s worth doing anyway. 👔 - Project-R2, is into the next phase. My involvement has been less as a active participant this week and more as a guiding voice here and there. Thankfully, this means the time investment has been much less and I’ve really noticed the difference. After all these years I’m not sure why it still surprises me how difficult it really is to balance large projects and being a good manager. Thankfully this week a few other took up the mantal of this project, moving us into the due-dilligence phase, so that I could spend more time with the team. 🌱 - Since taking over the cloud team at the end of last year, there has been a long list of small but meaningful activities to get around to. Improving the frequence and quality of the meetings, drafting and finalising the strategy, adding clarity to some job descriptions and making sure the whole team knows what’s going on in the business and the comms is good. This week I made signifcant progress on all these fronts - not complete - but progress and I’m pretty happy with it. I started doing these little 5-10m update vidoes at the end of the week for my team, to call out good work and interesting project updates. Finding the right comms that suits everyone will take a bit of experimenting but I trying a few things and gathering feedback. It feels a lot more natural that is used to. 🤓 - I’ve been involved in the enhancement of our managed services for a few years now, Project-R made some significant jumps on this last year. This year is about formalising that and looking at ISO 20000. It will take a while, but we’re building the roadmap, identifying the gaps and making progress. As we work with larger organisations and more public sector organisations this is becoming table-stakes. I can’t say I know significant amounts about all the details of this standard just yet, but I will be going deep on it over the next few months. I’m hoping to have enough time to document my learning journey on that here. What a nerd. 💍 - This week was my 13th wedding anniversary. We went out for a lovely meal at Boys Hall and had some really good, long overdue quality time together. I am always amazed by every anniversary, both that I am old enough to have been married for that long and that I have been able to sustain a marriage for that long. Long may our love continue. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week is the cold shower of real-life after the brief interlude of new year. Last week’s few days of relax and TV bringe watching quickly forgotton by five days of back-to-back meetings and workshops. Not a lot of context switching thankfully, just a lot of work to be done on a small number of topics. Busy but not too stressful. I guess as first weeks back go, it could have been a lot worse. ...

🏠 - The week between Christmas and New Year is an odd one isn’t it. This is the time when I do a little as possible. I stay in, keep warm, and binge as much as is possible to binge with the scribble of notes as ideas emerge for me the re-read for work later. 📈 - This weeks stats: 144 minutes of podcasts 5,483 average weekly steps 102 book pages read (1984 - p203-305) 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

The week of Christmas always passes with the contradiction of flying past and feeling feeling like the longest week. Family enjoyment all around. 📈 - This weeks stats: 377 minutes of podcasts 4,449 average weekly steps 53 book pages read (1984 - p149-202) 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: Bridgerton - S02 + S03 Amandaland Christmas Special Stranger Things - S02 A Ghost Story for Christmas - 2025

First week of my 3 weeks of leave, I have mostly been focused on … nothing much. Decompressing from a pretty stressful couple of months of work means that this week is binge watching lots of tv and movies, catching up on reading articles, whitepapers and some books and trying not too think about too much work. What that means is my background entertainment section below is larger than usual, I’ll be shortly adding a few more entries to /bookmarks and there I’ll be spending a day next week drafting one or two blog posts for the coming year. ...