Weeknotes

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. ...

This week was shaped by one day: my second day of leadership training. It meant the whole week, and perhaps several week after will be about reflection and improvements on myself and my leadership. 🧘‍♀️ - Tuesday was the second day of facilitated leadership training by the team at Wonderful Brilliant , having started the first day last month. I’ll be honest, having done a lot of coaching before I came into the training expecting to not learn much and spend my time observing the rest of the team and learning more about them. While I certainly achieved that expected outcome, I also came away with a lot to reflect on regarding my own leadership and thinking about certain topics that I hadn’t really give much attention to since the last time I had coaching. I will say this now - I love coaching, I think it’s very powerful for any leader at whatever level to have the support of someone external that can provide a fresh perspective on things. I need to do this more. ...

This week an unusual and very compressed week with a bank holiday Monday and a day out of the country. So with the remaining days I sat in my little office trying to keep focused during this 30-plus degree heat. ✍🏻 - Project-R2 progresses with plenty of hiring and project planning underway. However, this wasn’t the most interesting thing about this project this week. It was a small conversation about how to handle ITIL change management in a world of code and pull-requests. It needed to be a longer conversation but I’ve added it to my blog draft list. ...

This week has been few days where I have mostly had my people manager hat on, 1:1s, appraisals, feedback and hiring. The emotional labour of such a week means that I am very pleased to be heading into a long weekend. 🧍 - Project-R2, after six months of intense work has finally signed. Now the real work begins. Hiring across 3 countries, 4 additional parallel projects to be resourced and that’s just the beginning. It all starts with a lot of CVs reviewing, interviews and onboarding - so a tricky couple of months and not my favourite part, but there is plenty of exciting stuff to be involved in so I’m looking forward to it. ...

This week started with a couple of long days in the office, which meant that by Wednesday morning I already felt like I’d done a week of work. I got to spent a lot of good quality time with my teams and my peers this week though and while tiring, it always bring up my motivation. 🏢 - Starting the week with two days in the office for our usual monthly management meetings. This time we made sure that everyone was face-to-face and we did an additional joined up session. There was nothing special about the sessions themselves, this is all business-as-usual stuff, but side conversations during breaks and the show-and-tell of AI usage, new tools and new reports was really the high-value stuff. ...

This week has been an emotional week of highs and lows, introspection, reflection and customer engagement. 🎓 - I spent one day this week in the office with some of my fellow senior managers in the first day or a two-day facilitated executive training. This was the usual round insights reports, objective setting and working though shared challenges. Despite having done this sort of thing before I did find it very useful, it was high quality training and it gave me a few things to polish up my management pack content. ...