🏠 - 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. ...
My last working week before Christmas meant, looking back and looking forward. I’m not going to spend too much time looking back during this weeks weeknote, you’ll have to wait a couple of weeks for my blogpost on that so this week has more been about preparations, hand-overs and looking forward. 🖊️ - I spent a decent amount of time this week writing down my strategy for the cloud practice. This not not about some manger aggrandising but something that is important for the wider business to understand the things we’ll be focusing on as a team (and consequently things we won’t be). It’s actually something that has been an ask from the engineers themselves for some time, that they would like to have a clear communicated strategy, something that focuses them all towards a goal. Hopefully what I am working on will achive that. This week was the first draft. It will take a first pass through the other directors and then the team leads before a final version is presented to everyone else. This is not the first time I’ve written such a thing and I base my approach on the famous (infamous?!) AWS 6-pager format. While I am not dogmatic about the approach, having something in written form backed by real data I do believe is important. So let’s see if it passes the first sniff test. ❔ - I was pretty light on my Project-R2 contributions this week. I was only a contributing member for this weeks workshop and preparations were underway for presentations while I am away. I did however spend some time reading and responding the the first batch of questions. I always like this bit because the questions often tell you more about a company and their current experience than anything they might say directly. Mostly strightforward stuff, but their have been a few questions that have required some thinking. Even if this whole process isn’t successful there have been a lot of things a long the way that will result in service improvements over the next year. 🧰 - I had a session this week on tooling where two teams got to come together and agree on a joint roadmap. There are lots of things we’re working on at the moment and lots of tools we’re likely to replace in the near future as we’re scaling beyond what they are capable of. There are some fundimental things however that are under the microscope - monitoring, cmdb discovery, finops. All of thes will result in further good deep-dive conversations in the new year. What was good though was the re-affirm that our princiapls of collaboration and build the interface build the tools still applies. 🎄 - So, this is indeed my last working week of the year which means a bit of rushed end to the week, but fret not I will still be writing weeknotes during the Christmas period. I still have a lot of reading to do so I’ll still have a few insights to share. I’ll also be working on my end-of-year reflection post so there is that to look forward to. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...
Another big Project-R2 week this week, but also really getting to know my new team much better and thinking about the future. 🗣️ - The result of last weeks cruch time meant that a few of my 1:1s had to be pushed back a few days. I hate having to move 1:1s because I respect the time I spend with people and the mutual value of the sessions, however in this case, even if I could have shuffled things I don’t think I would have been in the right mental state to support them the way they deserved to be supported. The knock-on effect of moving the sessions was the first two days of the week being jam-packed with 1:1s. Taking on a new team is not easy but I’ve certainly found it easier this time and I’ve learnt my lesson by giving myself 15m breaks between sessions that ensure I’m always bringing the right energy and focus to each session. 👔 - Project-R2 didn’t stop this week. With the RFP submitted last week, Thursday had a 4-hour presenation so the rest of the week was preparing for that session. Thankfully, it went very well. The debrief session back at the office overlapped with the start of the Christmas party and a couple of celebration drinks later and I was done. Emotionally drained, but the peak has been climbed. Friday has another presentation, but I was remote and it was significantly easier once we knew what to expect. 🔮 - Friday was also a little bit of time to start thinking about my new role and thinking towards subsequent years had in store. Next week, I’ll be putting pen to paper on my cloud strategy, thinking about travel to other Claranet group countries to collaborate on some shared initatives and also what my role and the practice might bring if aquisitions were on the table in the next 18-months (nothing yet - but the market looks interesting). 📈 - This weeks stats: ...
Crunch week. No avoiding it, this was a tough one. 3 days in the office, one evening working into the early hours of morning but it’s over now and I can take a couple of days rest before the next stage starts. Did I mention it’s only 2 weeks until I’m on leave for Christmas?! ⚰️ - Project-R2 is out the door. The RFP response got completed with superhearo manuvers from several people working right up until the submission deadline. It was the reason for my office visits and took over 95% of my week. There are mixed feelings about this one. Scary/Exciting if we win it, but also Sad/Releaved if we don’t. Either way, next week follows with the presentation stage right until January - more work ahead. 👐🏼 - The only other notable highlight this week was that I had a good session meeting my team leaders face-to-face for the first time. It was important to spend this time together and hear there thoughts, opinions and prirorities. There is a good mix of voices in the room and I think with the right structure we can really make a big change. Genuinely excited. It’s this team and this new role that is keeping my motivated when everything else is a big struggle. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...
This week has been the start of crunch time. Lead for Project-R, author for Project-R2 and now Cloud Practice Director has meant long hours with context switching fuelled by caffeine and some good work collegues. I say crunch time because I’m doing this with full awareness that is is short term (a few weeks - not a sustained position) and what comes out the other side will hopefully be worth it. Despite the support (at work and at home) and the shining light at the end of the tunnel I’m not sure it’s made it any easier. It’s been a rough one. ...
Sometimes there are weeks that really push my mental resliance, testing how far I can stretch my abilities to multi-task, prioritise and still ship things. This is one of those weeks. I can confidently say I left nothing on the table. 🪆 - Project-R2 continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Asked to build a dedicated team for the oppertunity, it really means looking at building an MSP inside an MSP. Engieering, Support, HR, Finance, all elements are being considered. Good exercise, but getting in all written down and actually filling out the RFP responses continues to drain and be impacted by the occassional executive dysfunction. 🗓️ - A highlight of the week was a single session with a customer, where they discusse their project roadmap for the year and I had the oppertunity to discussed our roadmap and how it aligns with what they are trying to do. I do these types of sessions all the time but it’s rare to get such great insight and transparency from a customer and both parties left very statisfied. 🧢 - Last week I mentioned that new organisational changes had been announced. On Wednesday, after candidates for the new Director of Cloud Practice dropped out of the running, I was asked to step into the role on an interim-basis. While I had done a similiar role and with an almost identical title four years ago, this role is a bigger role and comes with the budget responsibility that my previous role did not. I was asked to come into the role on a interim basis with the longer-term intention of taking on the role if both I and the company can make sufficient provision over the next few months for some of my existing responsibilities. It is an exciting oppetunity and I look forward to getting back in the weeds with the cloud engineers and the customers they are supporting. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...
A week of R&R requires some much needed R&R… 🧯 - Well the week started with an escalation on Project-R. Nothing really drastic but a combination of small problems which has led to an unhappy customer. Thankfully both sides had planned for such an eventuality and we had a well documented structure in place so we just had to follow the playbook. A good test I guess, even it does mean my calls will be starting at 8am for the coming days. A good reminder that even in projects you should plan for failure and have open discussions early on about how to handle it. 🦾 - After receving the RFP for Project-R2 at the tail end of last week, I decent amount of my week was further reading and planning. Lots of questions to ask and assumptions we’ll need to make but it’s definitly an interesing oppertunity. Lots of people are worried about it though, so I’ll be taking on the emotional labour of getting everyone though the process over the next few weeks. If we win this one (and it’s a big if) then it’s one of those “once a year” projects that will keep up growing. Exciting but exhausting. 💬 - It was announced this week that there will be come upcoming changes in the business. Not impacting me or my role (so dodging that bullet this time) but we’re moving to a more practice/business-unit based org structure. I think this is a very postivie step forward. The discussions I had this week were about looking back on previous models and org structures including what worked well and what didn’t and how we can make this chance sucessful. I’ll less cynical this time around and feeling pretty confident about this change and it setting up the right foundations. 🏉 After a long week, on Friday we travelling into London to watch the Harlequins Women vs Gloucester Women at the Twickenham Stoop. Only my second ruby game and I absolutely loved it. My daughter also got to meeet england players Ellie Killdunne and Zoe Aldcroft, which was big highlight. 🍰 Last weekend was my mother’s 70th birthday so this weekend as an additional treat we decided to go to Fortnum and Mason for some afternoon tea. Great way to round off the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...
New portfolio models, more roadmaps and the next big growth oppertunity. 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the london tube map design prinicpals). This started as a suggestion from marketing as a good visual to present what is now a long and quite complex portfolio of services. What it turned into was a great model to have conversations about customer journeys, portfolio gaps and service transitions. This week I managed to finalise the first version of the model and I’m pretty pleased with it. Looking forward to gettting feedback on it from sales, from wider business stakeholders and more importantly from customers. 🧰 - More time was spent this week building out the roadmap for internal systems (known as Epic 2). These are changes to support greater process efficiency, more automation in delivery and to support more future enhancements to our customer portal - giving more capability and more transparancy. I am really excited about this and the next six-months is going to some really great things. 🔍 - We also started a review of our monitoring capability. This took the form of looking at three levels - component-level (do we have any gaps?), application-level (how we bring more consistency of application awareness across our customers) and experience-level (how to we bring in our network and experience monitoring into the mix and how do we enhance it). We now have some actions at all levels and over the next month we’ll start to build this into a roadmap. I’m also starting to consider how much of this we expose to our customers as well. 📨 - Friday was a little visit to my old employer Mimecast. A heady compination of both problem solving, stratric planning and nostalgia. Claranet have had a partnership with Mimecast for many years (itself a long story) but this was the first time I had engaged with them directly. The hope is to turn this partnership into more of strategic one - but there is a long way to go on both sides for that. ...