Weeknotes

This week I have mostly been in workshops with both partners and customers. Getting some miles in, tired, but worth it. 🏢 - On Tuesday, I spent the day at the IBM UK HQ talking to them about their portfolio of products and our planned strategy for further collaboration with them over the next year. Despite their market perception as “big blue” the most corporate of corporate companies, they actually have some really good tech and solve some really cool problems. This is the first workshop with them of a series that will happen over the next few months as we align ourselves. I am hopeful for what can be achieved here. 🚁 - Also this week I attended a customer QBR. All our corporate customers have these sessions and while I often attend the sessions for our Top-25, I also like to occasionally drop into some of our others because it allows me to get a better view of “reality vs vision”. Boy, did I! Lots of little things for us to improve on - nothing massive that is damaging their service or the relationship but lots of feedback that made me cringe - which tells me we still have a long way to go. Awkward, but still enjoyable and absolutely useful. 🚄 - When I wasn’t in London, I was on my way to spend the day with a customer in Lille. I do this about twice a year and it’s a good opportunity to meet some folks face-to-face that I mostly only ever see on teams. I also forgot just how many small clarifications and side conversations happens when in person. Coffee, lunch, problems fix and roadmap developed. I also find that having a few hours on the Eurostar is great for my personal productivity. 🏉 - Yes, another weekend of rugby activities. This time of year, it’s Love Rugby season, a few weekend sessions where the team turn up and have fun and games with people trying rugby for the first time. For the adults its just a good social and an opportunity to reflect on how far our kids have come since they started rugby through the same first-time sessions. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

Working for any company that is still growing an ambitious, there are occasional moments of pause when you’re standing at the bottom of Everest and thinking “Wow! That’s going to be amazing up there” and at the same time “Damn! I’ve got to climb that.” Well this was one of those weeks. 🙉 - The week started with some SMT governance and, while we’re all still finding our feet with the new sessions, there has already been some lessons learnt and some structural aspects that I’ll be taking into my own team sessions. One thing I am enjoying is the gradual move away from slides to documents for our pre-read content. 📋 - On the topics on documents, I also had a session this week discussing plans around ISO 20000 adoption. This is a standard that has become more relevant to us now that it is part of the G-Cloud framework and we’re engaging more in public sector activities. The first step of this process is bottom-up review of all of our documentation with the main aim of making it not just internally useful (an ISO 9001 requirement) but also in a position to be presented to our customers who increasingly want to see this level of detail. A big job, and not the most exciting but with some help from AI and some time documenting our style guides, it shouldn’t be too difficult to reach this first milestone. 🔩 - ServiceNow is the beating heart of the MSP business, but there are always aspect to this platform I am learning about and planning on adopting more. This week, we started looking a improving our project management capabilities in the platform, extending the QA processes and improving our time recording. The moment I start talking to people about their use of the platform I always come away with a long list of ideas - always a good sign and often a highlight of the week. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week was a crunch week, and I my calendar tells me is going to be the start of a crunch month. Long hours, lots of context switching, but also lots getting done that will hopefully bring in some interesting work over the rest of the year. 👔 - Project-R2 crunch week as we get ready to submit BAFO. Lots of moving parts, small changes, last minute questions and internal project planning as we prepare for what we think is an almost inevitable win of the customer engagement. If we win this then there is going to be weeks of hiring, onboarding, more project planning and customer site visits. All this last minute work is worth it though because if the data tells me anything, it’s that we are going to learn as much from them as they are from us. I expect to be involved in this one, if not directly, for several years to come. 🤖 - If things weren’t busy enough, the ocean of small admin activities - objectives (team and personal), to-do actions and the email backlog was seemingly endless. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was spending a bit more time on automation and building useful agents, well this admin area is certainly somewhere where automation continues to be a help and I will need to continue to invest in. I think I’ll be posting a few more things onto /devlog as I advance some of these things. 📥 - The week another two RFPs landing on our desk. I feel sorry for our bid team who are co-ordinating so many at the moment. We’re certainly noticed that the timelines are now shorter, which I think is based upon an assumption that both reading and responding is supported by AI. While there is some truth to that, I often still take the time to read end-to-end because there are often small nuggets of information or detail that I find just doesn’t come out from my first-pass AI summary. We’re also working on some style guides for written AI because slop is real and I’m getting increasingly frustrated with having to edit large quantities of it. While it certainly speeds up the overall submission process, the work of our editors (of which I am occasionally one) is a painful task. 🏉 - A ruby triple feature this weekend where we attended the Harlequins Women vs Saracens Women and made it home in time to watch the England vs Italy men’s game. Sunday was my daughter training at home as usual, but by that point I was happy to spend a few quite hours at home before the week begins again. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week certainly felt like a rush while I was in it, but on reflection I think I managed to find a bit of balance between work and personal things this week. 🤠 - I started the week, deep into the archives of our portfolio after I was escalated to about a customer with a service that I didn’t think we provided any more. This ended up in a small side quest of reviewing customers on old services, on old services description and trying to understand risk and impact. Turns out we still manage Active Directory for some SMB customers and also that RDS hosting is still a thing for some of our customers despite the fact that AVD has been out since 2019. Anyway, working the product team we now have a plan and I can put away my fedora and whip. 🗄️ - I had an interesting vendor call with Panzura this week. We’re been re-selling them to our architecture and construction companies for a while now, but they have a portfolio pivot, a new partner structure and we have a few new use-cases. Vendor calls can always be a bit tricky, as you don’t want to show too much enthusiasm or commit too much but also not be too aloof. A good outcome for me is that I come away from the sessions with something to think about - it means they’ve found a gap and sparked my interesting. This was one of those sessions. 📥 - Project-R2 keeps ploughing on - four more weeks and we’ll have our answer. This week was more information in the data room and more Q&A. It meant a lot of reacting to daily uploads and stand-up calls at the start and end of each day and we made frequent small adjustments to our proposal as we got further into the detail. 🐾🏥 - More vets visits and also a hospital check-up visit for me. Nothing scary or anything to worry about but it mean more running around, juggling my calendar and working later than I would normally to balance our the time off in the day. I am always grateful to be in a position to have this flexibility but damn is it difficult to re-schedule things. 📚 - One thing we’ve started doing in our house is having a few hours on a Sunday afternoon without TV and without our phones. We mostly use this time to read books. While I certainly enjoy the habit I have of reading for 30 minutes before bed, I have some to really appreciate the extra couple of hours as relaxation time and a great way to balance our the typical Sunday afternoon anxiety. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

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. Equal parts boring, frustrating and educational. Lessons learnt, to-do list added to. 🗃️ - I got to shadow a meeting this week between a customer and some of my German colleagues 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 available 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 commercial, one operational. 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 acquisition 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 opportunities 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 things along the way. 👔 - Project-R2 continues at pace, with this week starting the due-diligence 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 iterations 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 minute 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 opportunities. 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 opportunities 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 resilience - 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 distributed. 🐾 - 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 town hall. I always appreciate this bi-annual sessions, not just because of their inherently 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 definitely 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 critical, 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 calendar, 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 ocean - 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 mantle of this project, moving us into the due-diligence 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 frequency 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 communication is good. This week I made significant progress on all these fronts - not complete - but progress and I’m pretty happy with it. I started doing these little 5-10m update videos at the end of the week for my team, to call out good work and interesting project updates. Finding the right communication 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: ...