Weeknotes

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. ...

As I read back over the past weeknotes I realise that there has been a bit of rhythm where by each week a different aspect of my role comes to the forefront for that week. I’ve worn the sales hat, the systems engineer hat, the strategy hat, and this week it’s certainly the people manager hat. 🧔 - We’re entering annual appraisal season, which means I have to prepare for and deliver appraisals over the next 6 weeks for each of my 13 direct reports. This week I started preparations. Not the easiest thing to do as I have only been responsible for this team for six out of the twelve months and there is very limited information on 1:1s prior to me taking over. Like all of my knowledge-work activities these days I am also using this as an opportunity to train a cowork skill to capture useful information, coaching me on improving the feedback and formatting the output for input into our HR system. Likely that I’ll have a few more updates on this in the weeknotes to come. ...

This week is probably the most CTO-like profile of a week I’ve had in a while. Covering all business areas and also finding some time for a bit of personal growth along the way. - I started the week back wearing my portfolio hat. Planning the next publication of our Portfolio Radar (product catalog). This is always a fun time for me because I get to speak to all the product managers and find out what new things are coming on the roadmaps of each area and how discussions about how they all fit together. It’s bit of a time commitment to keep this content fresh but really it’s really just an output and it’s the conversations and the alignment that are the real value. ...