• 🏢 - 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.
  
  

• 💻 - One little perk of my Tuesday office visit was also that I got to pick up my new Mac. I’d been working on my Macbook Pro M1 since 2020 so it was time for a refresh. Honestly, that little 13" M1 was still doing a pretty good job for my day-to-day work but I think six-years is enough of sweating that asset and it was nice to get something a little bit more responsive. So from now on the machine I’m using is a Midnight blue Macbook Air M5.
  
  

• 🌟 - I started annual appraisals for my team this week. It will take a few weeks for me to go through all my team but it was a good start this week. Being able to take pause and reflect over a year of work I think is a good opportunity and actually something I enjoy. It’s certainly a moment of intense emotional labour, which is why I stagger them over a few weeks. Despite not all the conversations being perfectly positive, I always get as much of out the process as I hope my team do. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that appraisals are a reflection of management as well as a reflection of the performance of an employee. This year I have used AI to help support this process, both in gathering supporting evidence and following up of actions but the reflections and feedback have been entirely my own.
  
  

• - My side-quest of the week (mostly while on the train) has been starting the draft of my next blog post on my experience with Copilot and more specifically with Cowork. I’ve been using Cowork since the moment that it was released into frontier at the beginning on the month and it’s huge uptick in my productivity. There are some edge cases and some behind the scenes automation required to make it truly effective, but I’ve been really enjoying it.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 268 minutes of podcasts
• 3,531 average weekly steps
• 30 book pages read (Homeland - p39-69)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• MAFS (AUS)

• 🎓 - 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.
  
  

• ⛯ - For a second day in the office, I sent most of it with a single customer. They have recently had some management changes and this was an opportunity for a reset and a look to the years strategy with them. I wish more of the organisations I worked with took the time to pause for 5 minutes, take a breath and think about what they want to do over the next couple of years and then building a plan based on that. Well, that’s unfair, maybe they do, but it’s nice to be brought into the conversation at the beginning rather than just at the execution end.
  
  

• 🐶🪦 - Friday was a really sad day. We had to have my 11-year old King Charles spaniel, Maude, euthanised. She had not been well for some time but it had gotten a lot worse over the past couple of weeks. The family and I are rightly devastated. Having the weekend to recover has been useful.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 350 minutes of podcasts
• 5884 average weekly steps
• 38 book pages read (Homeland - p0-38)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Running Point - S02
• Unchosen

• 🧔 - 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.
  
  

• 💎 - Project-R update on the week is a small but very exciting milestone. We got the verbal confirmation that we had indeed won the opportunity. There are still a few small contractual elements to finalise, but that will occur over the next week and then we’ll kick off the project properly. This is going to be a massive year in delivering this and an exciting opportunity for us to learn from the company and much as they learn from us.
  
  

• 🏉 - I took a half day on Friday to travel to worthing for my daughters annual rugby festival. Two days of watching under-twelves girls ruby teams. My daughter has come on leaps and bounds this year in her rugby. Last year she really struggled but this year I’ve seen her score her first try and get involved in many tackles and scrummages. This festival was just the culmination of all that hard work and I couldn’t be more proud. It’s bitter-sweet for them because half the team moves up to under-forteens next year so this was the very last time they would all play together. For us parents, it’s a wonderful weekend of pints, chips and chat. Like most organised sport, it can feel like a chosen family and I’m happy my daughter continues to enjoy it.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 551 minutes of podcasts
• 5,699 average weekly steps
• 89 book pages read (Little Brother - p223-p312) - Finished
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Temptation Island - S02
• High Potential - S02

• - 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.
  
  

• 🌱 - The company is investing some more time and money in an executive leadership programme for all of our senior leaders in the business. This is important because there is a wide range of experience with the group, some having been senior leaders for a long time and others reasonably new to this level of role. As part of the programme each person starts with a 1:1 session, and I had mine this week. I’ve had the privilege of working with some great executive coaches over the years and I have high hopes for this one. Despite my experience of coaching, I always find something to take away and reflect on, so hopefully this is something we can continue.
  
  

• 📈 - Being a few months before our new financial year, it means that budget season has started. This week focusing on costs. Lots of detail, big spreadsheets and planning. Actions already to take away before the new year starts.
  
  

• 📄 - Project-R2 continues to progress, albeit, in the fine grained detail of contracts. Lots discussions over wording, discussions over scenarios, SLAs, implications. For most folks, the contracting stage is the boring bit, but for me it’s something I actually enjoy. It’s like a tabletop exercise for the service. What could go wrong? What does this measure incentivise? Does this wording allow either party to abuse the contract? What does this schedule tell you about their previous experiences? Fun.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 479 minutes of podcasts
• 4,314 average weekly steps
• 83 book pages read (Little Brother - p139-p222)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Capture - S03

• 📄 - It’s been a few weeks since there have been any significant movement on Project-R to mention here. It has really been all about the backroom parts - negotiations, initial external legals reviews etc. All critical but not at all fun. This week has involved further workshops over contracting - specific details of clarification, updated schedules etc.
  
  

• 🎤 - This week I delivered the Resilience Webinar - after multiple hours of preparation I gave the 45-minute webinar. Now to move onto the follow-up stage. 45 minutes for a subject like this really felt like just the cliff notes, and in my hours of preparation I realised that there are lots of areas where I have thoughts, some opinions and research output I want to share. I am going to flesh this out more as a blog over the next few weeks.
  
  

• 🏢 - Second week of the month means another week of 2 x 3 hours of monthly management meetings. I could sit here and by cynical about such management sessions as an example of large-company bureaucracy, however the reality of these sessions is far from it. Much effort in put in during the week before to provide useful pre-read content, discussion topics are limited and 1-slide decision papers make up the majority of the time spent. It’s far from perfect, as we unlearn some typical “presentation management theatre” behaviours, but it’s started to be the foundation of stronger organisational communication and allowed us to progress more initiatives than was previous possible.
  
  

• - I spent more time with Copilot Cowork as a follow-on from last week’s initial experiments. It’s becoming a little bit of a side-project for me and I’m getting a lot of enjoyment out of it. This week I was focused on the typical starting point of developing out more specific custom skills, in particular branded documents for a most commonly used content. I expect to spend another couple of weeks on this, covering several different documents types we have in use and then starting to build them out to fill in content gaps we have and structure the use of the skills into larger processes.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 467 minutes of podcasts
• 5083 average weekly steps
• 80 book pages read (Little Brother - p58-p138)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Trying - S04
• The Capture - S02
• Big Mistakes - S01
• Twenty Twenty Six

• - I think my favourite part of this week is that I have been given access to a new toy which is Copilot Cowork. I’m just starting to experiment with it, starting first with your typical meeting management and document generation scenarios but I’m excited to see where it goes. I will almost certainly have a deeper dive on this in the coming weeks.
  
  

• ⛑️ - Next week I have a resilience webinar next week so there has been a lot of final prep to do this week. What’s been particularly useful about this topic is that I’ve got enough material not only for the webinar but likely for a longer form blog post, which I am also quite excited to finalise.
  
  

• ☔ - The overlap of a few projects, both internal and large external customers means that I’m expecting us to be entering a crunch period of change. This doesn’t happen often, perhaps once every two years but I can see it coming and I always take these things seriously and prepare my teams accordingly. That means ensuring we’re prioritising the things that are going to have the biggest impact in making us more efficient and also ensuring that each of my team leaders knows what to expect and how to handle it. Exciting and slightly nerve-wracking, but these are the types of periods that while a little horrid to live through, you look back on and see growth - personal as well as organisational.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 371 minutes of podcasts
• 3,754 average weekly steps
• 57 book pages read (Little Brother - p0-p57)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Lord of the Files
• Last One Laughing - S02
• Trying - S01-S03
• The Capture - S01

• 🏗️ - Checkout the /changelog to see things I have been adding to this site recently. I have mostly been using GitHub copilot to help me work through historical spelling and grammar issues as well as write addition Hugo templates or maintenance scripts that help make this site easier to maintain and keep it fresh. In particular this week I was working on the /now page so that it looks a little nicer and I have a script that I can run weekly to keep it fresh. I’ve been using it as an excuse to play a bit more with GitHub Copilot and while the development cycle takes a bit of getting used to - I admit, it gave me that dopamine hit from coding that I’ve not had in a long time.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 260 minutes of podcasts
• 3,773 average weekly steps
• 26 book pages read (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p340-p366) - Finished
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Death in Paradise - S15
• The Dyers’ Caravan Park - S01
• The Pitt - S01
• Why Women Kill - S01
• Derry Girls - S01-S03

• • This week was another progressed RFP and presentation. Given the frequency of these now, the team are certainly getting slicker at it and the content and story is getting tighter. The one this week was certainly a useful session that was actually more Q&A focused, so felt more workshop than usual presentation. I can’t say all are like this - I’ve certainly seen some recently that are presenting the RFP content that the recipients haven’t read.
    
    
• • April is the start of budget season so that means that the end of March means that I need to spend time reviewing cost owners and documenting my high-level budget objectives (asks and removals). Can be a little boring but is a good reflection point on what we need to achieve the next set of objectives.
    
    
• • If you’ve read anything on this site then you know that I like writing, but I’ve come to understand that lots of people in our business also like videos. That means meeting people where they are and ensuring that for all documents or presentations that I produce, that I also provide companion videos. This week I caught up on a bit of a backlog of them; everything from portfolio updates, team updates and breakdown of the strategy. Videos ranging from 5 minutes to 30 minutes. I’ve come to actually enjoy them. I’ve also come to find additional value from them because the very act of having explain something out loud and pre-empt questions actually improves the corresponding written words themselves. I expect to continue to do a lot of these and I’m encouraging others as the combination of writing and videos is good pre-read material to avoid too many monologue meetings.
    
    

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 220 minutes of podcasts
• 3638 average weekly steps
• 46 book pages read (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p294-p340)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Small Prophets - S01

• 🏢 - 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:

• 241 minutes of podcasts
• 5,358 average weekly steps
• 37 book pages read (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p256-p293)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere
• Star Trek: Starfleet Academy - S01

• 🙉 - 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:

• 526 minutes of podcasts
• 4,801 average weekly steps
• 45 book pages read (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p209-p254)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Blue Therapy - S01
• The Big C - S04

• 👔 - 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:

• 339 minutes of podcasts
• 5,623 average weekly steps
• 72 book pages read (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p137-p208)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Yellowjackets - S01
• Bridgerton - S04

• 🤠 - 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:

• 316 minutes of podcasts
• 5760 average weekly steps
• 170 book pages read
  • (Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future - p195-p229) - Finished
  • (House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company - p0-p136)
    
    

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Big C - S03
• The Walsh Sisters - S01

• 🕵️ - 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:

• 117 minutes of podcasts
• 4,734 average weekly steps
• 65 book pages read (Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future - p129-p194)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Big C - S01+S02

• 🏢 - 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:

• 308 minutes of podcasts
• 5703 average weekly steps
• 84 book pages read (Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future - p45-p128)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Fallout - S02
• Agatha Christie’s The Seven Dials
• Betrayal

• 👔 - 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:

• 726 minutes of podcasts
• 4485 average weekly steps
• 44 book pages read (Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future - p0-p44)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Quiz
• Nicholas Rossi: Predator on Trial
• Wild London

• 🏛️ - 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:

• 246 minutes of podcasts
• 5,590 average weekly steps
• 34 book pages read (Annie Bot - p288-322) - Finished
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Queer Eye - S10

• 🗣️ - 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:

• 320 minutes of podcasts
• 7,889 average weekly steps
• 187 book pages read (Annie Bot - p100-287)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Stranger Things - S05
• Traitors - S04
• Patience - S01+S02

• 👔 - 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:

• 245 minutes of podcasts
• 4,888 average weekly steps
• 99 book pages read (Annie Bot - p0-99)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Stranger Things - S04
• The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives - S01+S02

• 🧭 - The week started with the first draft reviews and discussions of the cloud strategy. A important first step to ensure that I have accurately represented all the conversations over the past few weeks, that I have clearly describing the identified problems, solutions and direction. It is also key in these reviews that plenty of edits are made by others so that it is a collaboration for which everyone feels engaged and part of. I have experience too many strategies which felt disconnected or too management heavy and I don’t want to repeat those mistakes. It will take a few more weeks to finalise this, but I had a few conversations about it this week and it was a good start.
  
  

• 👔 - Project-R2 continues, it progressed during my absence and this week I was in London for another workshop. This time it was a about Service Integration and Management (SIAM), covering both the tooling, it’s role in the wider ITIL services and the more personal and financial elements of managing vendors. Lots of good conversation and I certainly learnt a few things in the deep dive preparation for this. I am going to write up this work into a blog post this year because it’s a topic that I really sparked by interest.
  
  

• 🎂 - This week as also my daughters 12th birthday (and my mother-in-law’s birthday as they share the same day). It makes me feel old but also gives me the warm fuzzy feelings. Multi family dinner visits, but it only seems like 5 minutes since the last meals of the previous weeks when our house was full. Anyway, a nice way to spend the week and I’m very proud of her and who she’s becoming.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 367 minutes of podcasts
• 6,162 average weekly steps
• 34 book pages read (1984 - p305-339) - Finished
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• [None] - well nothing finished this week.

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 144 minutes of podcasts
• 5,483 average weekly steps
• 102 book pages read (1984 - p203-305)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Ripple - S01
• Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story - S01
• Stranger Things - S03
• Death in Paradise - 2025 Christmas Special
• Peep Show - S01-S09
• Jaws
• Wake Up Dead Man
• Jaws @ 50: The Definitive Inside Story
• The Long Walk
• Final Destination: Bloodlines
• The Meg
• Meg 2: The Trench
• Death Cap: The Mushroom Murders
• Great New Year’s Bake-off 2025/26
• Scamanda

📈 - 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

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.

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 476 minutes of podcasts
• 6,327 average weekly steps
• 49 book pages read (1984 - p99-148)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Frauds - S01
• Bridgerton - S01
• Misery
• Jurassic Park
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park
• Jurassic Park III
• Jurassic World
• Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
• Hatty Preston - Toxic Waste

• 🖊️ - I spent a decent amount of time this week writing down my strategy for the cloud practice. This is not about some manager 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 achieve 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 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 straightforward stuff, but there 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 along 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 fundamental things however that are under the microscope - monitoring, CMDB discovery, FinOps. All of these will result in further good deep-dive conversations in the new year. What was good though was the re-affirm that our principles 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:

• 270 minutes of podcasts
• 3,355 average weekly steps
• 30 book pages read (1984 - p69-98)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Mr Mercedes - S01 + S03
• Celebrity Race Across The World - S03

• 🗣️ - The result of last weeks crunch 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 presentation 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 initiatives and also what my role and the practice might bring if acquisitions were on the table in the next 18-months (nothing yet - but the market looks interesting).
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 309 minutes of podcasts
• 4,980 average weekly steps
• 31 book pages read (1984 - p37-68)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Mr Mercedes - S01
• Slow Horses - S05

• ⚰️ - Project-R2 is out the door. The RFP response got completed with superhero manoeuvres 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/Relieved 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 their thoughts, opinions and priorities. 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:

• 815 minutes of podcasts
• 7,558 average weekly steps
• 0 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• (None)

• 🪆 - The Project-R2 bid keeps going. This has been the first time where I have worked on the content of a bid using AI for support and I’ve discovered something new. Writing with copilot at scale is more difficult than expected. I’ve been using copilot daily pretty much since it was released but this is first opportunity to use it at scale for writing thousands of words of content and many prompts and tweaking both for output and for questions and discovery. I’ve found that the process is just as draining sometimes at the writing itself. I’ve also noticed that the more I use copilot the more I feel the blank-page anxiety and go to reach for it like a habit. This blog might be one of the few place where I don’t use it and I don’t have that anxiety.
  
  

• 👂🏻 - This week included by first proper 1:1s with my new team, the first time to really deep-dive with them on their development, their concerns and their opportunities. I now have 8 direct reports, something I’ve not had in about four years, so it’s taking a bit of getting used to. Having said that, I’ve certainly learnt a few things since last time and I have higher expectations for myself as a manager this time around. While I’m not a fan of the extra admin, I am loving the opportunity to get to know these people much better.
  
  

• 🅿️ - As I start to bed in to the new role, I have also had a week littered with smaller meetings and ad-hoc 1:1s to get me back up to speed on things. I’ve been focusing on the 4 P (people, projects, portfolio, partners) as these are the things that will help be understand the current landscape, any fires and start to scribble down the start of a strategy.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 67 minutes of podcasts
• 3,338 average weekly steps
• 37 book pages read (1984 - p0-37)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Hack

• 🪆 - Project-R2 continues to be the gift that keeps on giving. Asked to build a dedicated team for the opportunity, it really means looking at building an MSP inside an MSP. Engineering, 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 occasional executive dysfunction.
  
  

• 🗓️ - A highlight of the week was a single session with a customer, where they discussed their project roadmap for the year and I had the opportunity to discuss 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 satisfied.
  
  

• 🧢 - 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 similar 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 opportunity and I look forward to getting back in the weeds with the cloud engineers and the customers they are supporting.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 332 minutes of podcasts
• 7,155 average weekly steps
• 18 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p267-p285 - Finished)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Nobody Wants This - S02
• Trigger Point - S02
• MAFS(UK) - S10
• Taskmaster - S20

• 🧯 - 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 run-book. 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 receiving 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 definitely an interesting opportunity. 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 positive 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 change successful. 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 meet 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:

• 285 minutes of podcasts
• 5,609 average weekly steps
• 0 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Only Murders in the Building - S05
• Gen V - S02
• Celebrity Traitors - S01

• 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the London tube map design principals). 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 getting 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 transparency. 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 combination of both problem solving, strategic 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.

• 🚧 - The week ended with the drop of a new RFP (hereto known as Project-R2). I’d seen the RFI a few weeks prior and it was a big one, like really big, where I can say for almost certain we’ll be competing with a GSI. Fun times.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 407 minutes of podcasts
• 8,337 average weekly steps
• 28 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p238-p266)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Riot Women - S01
• Blue Lights - S03

• 📋 - I’ve been bending my brain thinking, planning and learning about knowledge management and document management. At the current time, like many other MSPs our knowledge management is diverse and inconsistent. This week I am been on a deep-dive to re-design our approach; thinking about documents, versioning, approvals, documentation and code, documentation in git repositories, documentation in wikis and how to handle keeping things up-to-date where there is complex representations like tables and diagrams as well as text. I am in the process of writing this all down so that others can contribute to the new strategy. More plans to come.
  
  

• 🎙️ - In the middle on the week, I delivered two sessions of a webinar on our portfolio. It covered both the topic of my previous blog on why I hate product roadmaps, Claranet’s alternative to roadmaps and some of our upcoming focus areas. There has been quite a bit of prep for this over the previous week and I enjoyed working with my colleague Tom to present this - the back of forth always fun and making each session and slightly new experience. It’s been a while since I last delivered a webinar - I forgot how anxious I get in the build up but also how much I enjoy it in the moment.
  
  

• 📈 - One of the lessons learned from working on large projects (like Project-R) is that how the project is constructed into deliverable items, milestones and invoicing. It is a critical aspect and just as important as the solution itself. The middle of the week I spent re-viewing this again and ensuring that there are structures in play that are fair to both parties and that this is something we can take into future projects.
  
  

• ⛅ - I ended the week with an internal project kick-off for working on IBM Cloud. Yep - IBM. In a few months, when we have progressed more with it, I will do a little write up on the rationale here, but the sort description is that IBM have asked us to support the platform and they have lots of customers they are trying to keep on IBM Cloud or move to IBM Cloud as part of existing enterprise licensing agreements. This is a similar to the Oracle strategy of a few years ago. This is not just a tactical/opportunistic move on our part but also part of a wider strategy to focus more on enterprise customers.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 436 minutes of podcasts
• 6199 average weekly steps
• 36 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p201-p237)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• < None >

• 🛝 - This week has been definitely been about all the small things (say it ain’t so!). I don’t just mean lots of tiny 15 minute meetings or 5 minute emails to fire off, but I mean that it’s been a week where the mistakes have been small but also the wins. These days I’m mostly involved in the larger projects and these can suffer with what I call “death by a thousand cuts” - a project that doesn’t fail in some big bang catastrophe but very slowly over time due to lots of tiny mistakes. A project can go from profitable to unprofitable like a leaky kitchen tap that no one really notices. The flip side to this is “growth by a thousand steps” - tweak a agent, improve a process, add an automated business rule. These things on their are often forgettable improvements, easily missed by focusing on the next thing. Well this week has had plenty of both of these extremes - I now have a long list.
  
  

• 🚀 - We’ve been invested in developing our own tooling to support our engineers for several years now. The purpose of this tooling is to give us the best insight into our managed customers and to make migration and modernisation activities as easy as possible (so we can do more of them). This week saw another release from our team, enhancing our quality assurance and making sure that all the clouds we support have an equal set of features. We’re also working of some amazing AI tooling behind the scenes - but that’s for another day. I’m very proud of the team behind this and see how the tooling has matured as also it’s engagement.
  
  

• 💡 - A small other note this week - I’ve been back to doing some digging into some ideas and topics that interest me. At the moment I’m spending time reading on some of the other cloud platforms (Oracle cloud, IBM cloud, OVH) and also thinking about Operational Technology - both networks and security. Lots of ideas and scribbled notes. Nothing for now, but maybe a few things for the near future.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 265 minutes of podcasts
• 2,262 average weekly steps ⬇️
• 20 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p180-p200)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Grant Designs - 2025
• Murderbot - S01

• 📈 - Another week with a big emphasis on sales. A combination of account planning, renewals and a few roadmap conversations with customers meant that overall it felt engaging, like we had some exciting plans and that some of our customers will continue to push us.
  
  

• 🎟️ - My time in the office also allowed me to be part of another set of folks going through their induction to the business. Having given my usual 25 minutes on the products, our capabilities and the company, I got the usual around of questions. The questions are the reason I do it. We often hire other people from the industry and people with naturally ask questions in the context of where they have come from and their prior experience. This is great, because while answering their question I am also learning from them about their previous companies, products they are familiar with and a little about the people asking those questions. I will try and follow-up with the people asking the most interesting questions to get even deeper insight.
  
  

• 🌱 - This week I spent more time with some of our project management team discussing ways to improve what they do and provide more context to the day-to-day decisions they make. I massively admire project managers, but they have a level of organisation that I don’t naturally have. I’ve always surrounded myself with people that have this skill. In the sessions this week we discussed giving them better visibility of the overall finances of the projects and also the downstream impacts on movements in project tasks. We worked on improving dashboards and automating some of their worst admin tasks. I enjoyed really getting into the weeds with this team and it gave me a new found empathy for what they do.
  
  

• 🔜 - With a focus on quarterly updates to our portfolio radar, this week has been focused on gathering and discussing all the latest updates. Plenty of new things going in and some exciting new roadmap items. Some won’t quite make it this time around, but it’s been a good exercise and I’ve enjoyed all the discussions. I suspect we’ll release internally next week and to customers the week after, as per the previous agreed cadence.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 553 minutes of podcasts
• 5,277 average weekly steps
• 20 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p159-p179)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Wayward
• The Program: Cons, Cults and Kidnapping
• Grant Designs - 2025
• Star Trek: Stange New Worlds - S03

• ✨ - I’ve been writing about Project-R for a long time now and for project as long as this it is important to recognise the milestones along the way. This week we rolled out some improvements to our customer portal, based upon the feedback from this project. This is a big step because it’s something that shows just how big projects often cause an overall improvement to all customers. This one been the last of these, but we took a small moment to celebrate the first.
  
  

• 🎠 - On Wednesday I went in London (into our new offices) for some account planning with our sales and CX team to discuss what the future looks like for some of our biggest customers. Always a good exploration of how advanced our relationships are and if we continue to have services that make us relevant.
  
  

• ⛅ - This week I had a few challenger questions on the topic of our cloud services - put simply: What’s next for cloud?. Well, cloud and data centre services are certainly reaching maturity and some of which are over the tipping point of commodity, however despite this when I think everything is done there is always just-one-more-thing. Still a few ideas around sovereign, edge and a couple more hyperscale cloud providers to explore. A little bit more R&D in the near future I think.
  
  

• 🪫 - From time to time, I’ll have my closest work colleagues check-in and make sure I’m OK - this week was one of those times. Clearly a sign that I am outwardly taking on too much at once, often this also triggers an internal pause when I realise I might be close to overwork (and sometimes even overwhelm). Working in IT and solving technical problems has always been a bit of an addictive habit for me and working for an MSP continues to help me scratch that itch (there is a longer form post about this coming soon) but I do have to be careful sometimes. I’m very lucky to have people around me that look out for me and make sure I don’t stretch myself too far.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 430 minutes of podcasts
• 8,246 average weekly steps
• 11 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p147-p158)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Taskmaster - S19

• 📈 - As a continuation from last week, this week included more finance review sessions. While I’m already familiar with the numbers, these session were a good opportunity for me to learn about how they are received and what data is important to the practice leads in their day-to-day operations. There were differences in each as to be expected but it the excitement and interest was obvious, proving that data doesn’t have to dull it just has to be relevant.
  
  

• 🧭 - This week I took a little bit of time to look back at an old strategy document. This was something I wrote for our senior leaders in 2023. It has, of course, aged a little but it has been interesting to see that we have continued forward towards the vision and maintained the values even if the implementation has been a little slower than I would have liked (but isn’t it always?!). I am starting to reflect on this as early next year I will be updating and perhaps on this occasion I can be a little more realistic about the small steps along the way.
  
  

• 🔎 - Last week I was working on a Copilot agent to help support the authoring of service descriptions. I shared this with a few people and started to get in a few of their ideas and roadmap items as documents to review. This was great because I was getting feedback from them on what worked and what didn’t in addition to reviewing the output myself all of which meant that I could tweak the agent for better outputs. Five service descriptions went to our legal team for the final stage of review this week - this is the most I have seen done in a long time.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 247 minutes of podcasts
• 8,281 average weekly steps
• 10 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p136-p146)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Jury: Murder Trial - S01 + S02

• 👨🏼‍🚒 - I have noted before that disaster recovery is the hot topic of the moment and we’re getting a lot of customers caring about this topic who never cared about it before. This week we conducted an internal risk review to looking at our customers and identify those who had a DR solution, those who did not and those who had solutions but had gaps such as resourcing missing or un-tested solutions. Big programme of work kicking off as part of this - it doesn’t matter if you have it or not, no company should be left behind without DR.
  
  

• 🧯 - Also part of the DR story, I initiated a nice little exercise to review backup and DR on a per-asset basis - boring right?! Turns out not, there is a lot of dependency on IaC deployments for stateless DR events, but customers not having deployed or tested a secondary location to test that into. We also found some scenarios that I would call “classic” that require a two-stage backup restore process - fun!
  
  

• 🧑🏻‍✈️ - I’ve been using various AI tools in my daily workflow for some time. I’ve now started to do the extra little bit of work to turn some of my small library of prompts into Copilot agents that I can share with others. The first of these is a prompt to help product managers write and review our service descriptions. It’s been an interesting exercise of prompt turning, knowledge writing and just trying to get all those gut-feel reactions to certain output out of my head and into the agent. Definitely want to write some blog content on this one.
  
  

• 💷 - One thing that has been really important to me since I took the role of Deputy CTO is to make sure that all the leaders of our technical practices have a complete view of finance and sales information related to their area so that they can make better more wholistic and business impacting decisions. This is the stepping stone of providing them more autonomy to make the types of decisions that I would make. This week has been the start of sessions to present some of this data to them and gather feedback on if there is any other data we have that would be relevant to them. Some great workshops with insightful questions.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 238 minutes of podcasts
• 5,932 average weekly steps
• 11 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p124-p135)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Regime
• The Girlfriend - S01
• G’wed - S02

• 🗨️ - After the scurry of last week’s bid preparation, the week started with presenting one of those bids. A large bid of the multi-product, mutli-region variety with lots of requirements that would make it complex (and therefore fun for me) to deliver. Having been involved in lots of these presentations over the past few years, I have to say this was one of our best ones and show we are getting better at our content, our values and hitting the right tone of technical but not too technical.
  
  

• 🚪 - Working a bit more on the CX at the opposite end of the scale - Exit Management. Not the situation we ever like to find ourselves in but it is however a realistic one. I spent some time this week working with our teams on how this works in reality vs what the expectation looks like. Lots of things to think about. Something that needs to feel like an experience rather than a transaction.
  
  

• 🔎 - Once a quarter we do a “monitoring review”. It’s a session that’s a bit more in-depth than it sounds. It’s when the team reviews our standards, identifying improvements and identifying opportunities to improve automation. In most cases this is about taking the best work we’re done for individual customers or solutions and pushing them out to all customers. It’s also an opportunity for us to identify and gaps and inconsistencies to ensure that all customers are getting the same experience.
  
  

• 🌍 - After the trip to Dubai, we’ve had a couple of opportunities pop up in the middle east and we continue to build partnerships and relationships to expand in the region. I’ve had discussions about opportunities in Saudi, Bahrain, and Libya. All have been a great learning experience.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 672 minutes of podcasts
• 8157 average weekly steps
• 17 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p106-123)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Toxic Town
• Wednesday - S02
• Dexter: Resurrection - S01
• Mitchell & Webb Are Not Helping - S01

• 🧯 - Monday did not start on a good note, I had two escalations in my inbox to deal with and well, that pretty much set the tone for the whole week. Frustratingly while both different in their problem and from different customers they both had very similar themes: we didn’t do X on time, we don’t trust you have the skills to do X. While resolved by the end of the week, it was a cold-shower moment that it doesn’t matter how good your service is or your skills are, if you your CX falls below the standard then trust gets chipped away and it takes 10x as long to fix that as it does the problem that caused it.
  
  

• 📄 - Project-R reached a big milestone this week. After a year of paperwork, documentation and building landing zones we’ve now migrated our first pilot machines. Still a big hill to climb but I’m going to sit here on this rock and take in the view for a couple of hours before getting back to working through the next series of challenges.
  
  

• 🖍️ - We have two big bids on the go at the moment and I had some time blocked out to review the content. I have to say we’re getting much better at responding to these types of things that we were even a year ago. I’m sure I’ll be trotted out to give a “why Claranet” pitch soon enough - which I don’t mind, because I genuinely believe what I’m saying, but sometimes I wish there were a few others as passionate about telling that story as I am.
  
  

• 📓 - Project management is an MSP is a complicated beast. Multiple methods, multiple outputs, lots of different context to the various ways and means we implement it. Tasks, Estimates, Invoicing, Utilisation, resource planning. All complex, all messy. We’re got lots of people at the moment expanding their use of the new Microsoft Planner. I’ve been using this myself for a few weeks but this week I’ve started exploring it’s capabilities from a few different personas to see if it will work more broadly and help us deal with some of this complexity. As you’d expect it also has some Copilot integration, which at the moment I am a bit “meh!” about but we’ll see in a couple of weeks if I few on this tool improves.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 325 minutes of podcasts
• 6,500 average weekly steps
• 43 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p63-105)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Outrageous - S01
• Destination X - S01
• Night Agent - S02
• Upload - S04

• 🧑‍🚒 - I’ve been working with our engineering teams on merging together a few internal documents into something external we are able to provide to customers about how we deliver operational resilience. This is backup, patching, disaster recovery, compliance. As you’d expect we have lots of documentation on this sort of thing, cover lots of different scenarios. By putting this all in one place under what we’re calling the “Operational Assurance Plan” we can have joined up conversations with our customer and build reassurance that we’ve covered all of their scenarios and that we practically know exactly how to deliver it.
  
  

• ✍🏻 - You’d probably be shocked about the amount of documentation we produce and maintain as an IT company, both internally and on behalf of our customers. As a company that is ISO 9001 certified it’s something we take pretty seriously, but it’s not something that is easy or we take for granted. With Project-R, we have not only a very long contract and set of contractual changes, we’re also responsible for maintaining upwards of 20 documents as part of their service. With this is mind, I’m going back to basics and looking the processes we use to do this and more importantly the customer experience and how we can innovate in this area to make it a less painful and less bureaucratic process for all involved. Lots of interesting tools and processes to dig my teeth into. More on this in the coming weeks.
  
  

• 💎 - I don’t play solutions architect often these days (we have a good team of people for that) but when I do it’s often in the enterprise space, with those expensive systems that expensive to touch - think: Oracle, SAP, Dyanmics, IBM. Well I’ve had more than one conversation about these types of products this week and I think I’ll be putting my product hat back on in this are shortly.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 517 minutes of podcasts
• 9,385 average weekly steps
• 41 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p22-62)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Operation Dark Phone
• Mr Big Stuff - S01+S02
• Night Agent - S01

• 🪛 - Like most MSPs we’re a big ServiceNow user. However, I’ll admit, despite having spent about 8 years using it almost daily I’ve only really started to explore all it’s features, all it’s modules and it’s it’s automation and workflow possibilities over the past few months. This week I started being a bit more deliberate about my learning/digging. Document management, vendor management, GRC, maintenance and blackout windows, business rules. Scribbling notes and scheduling demos.
  
  

• 🌊 - DR scenario planning with a customer. One of our customers have recently been acquired and as is often the case in this scenario, we end up on calls with the new acquiring organisation walking them through that we do, details of the contracts and areas of responsibility - typical due-diligence stuff. This week, I got the opportunity to sit in on one of these calls, specially focused on DR (as I’m paying more attention to this topic at the moment) as the customer asked questions we went through a number of different scenarios. Really thought-provoking stuff actually. Access loss, ransomware, malicious actor, force majeure events, testing frequencies. I let my team do the talking, I was just there to scribble notes and think about how we can improve our service for this customer (and all our DR customers) later.
  
  

• 👷🏻 - You’d think that after decades of running customer projects that this would be an area of pure standardisation with little to re-think or innovate - well you’d be wrong. I’ve been observing how we deliver different types of projects for some time. Different scenarios, different engagement models, different team structures - I think we run them all at different times. I’m been thinking a lot more about it this week and trying to put those thoughts into words. I expect that those internal documents may resurface summarised in a blog post here at some point.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 507 minutes of podcasts
• 9758 average weekly steps
• 21 book pages read (Infinite Detail - p1-21)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Shifty

• 🏕️ - Monday and Tuesday were the tail end of the weekend of camping. A great opportunity to just sit in a field, read some books and catch up with family. It was also a good time for some walks and letting my brain digest a few things while in few surroundings. I didn’t take my laptop, but I certainly felt the craving to write more while I was there.
  
  

• 📖 - On my return from camping, I spent a day just catching up on some content that I had been meaning to read for a while. This included a good handful of white papers, some long-form articles and some videos, all of which I rarely have time to consume in my usual week. Lots of notes written, starting to form these together into some bigger things, but I’ve been reminded the that my /bookmarks isn’t a full as it should be and I’m doing a bad job at sharing. Must fix.
  
  

• 🧹 - I also spent a couple of days doing a spring clean on the house. While this seems like the most mundane of weeknote anecdotes (it is!), it is also the time where I managed to switch my brain off and consume far more podcasts than I would usually (about 3x as much). I can’t say that all the podcasts on my /podroll give me ideas and recommendations every time but I would say it’s something like one in every 10 hours, I just don’t know which 10.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 1049 minutes of podcasts
• 5,975 average weekly steps
• 104 book pages read (Sunrise on the Reaping - p243-p347 - Finished)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Handmaid’s Tale - S06

• 🔎 - Monday was spent with teams reviewing some internal processes, with a key focus on adding more automation between our security, risk, problem and incident management processes. I’m excited to see some of these things come into effect because we’re seeing improvements to both customers and our front-line engineers.
  
  
  

• 🤝 - Tuesday was my last working day for a week and half so was all about emails and handovers. Thankfully, there is plenty of momentum on our projects at the moment and I’ve been much better as writing down ideas and guardrails more regularly so there was very little to handover. These are periods that help me observe the resilience of our tech teams, particularly during holiday periods.
  
  

• 🏕️ - Wed-onwards is the annual family camping, an opportunity to read, write, catch up on a backlog of white papers and generally not do much. While this is a time for me to decompress, I also find it to be one of my most creative periods where I often end up with my notes app full of questions and ideas.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 411 minutes of podcasts
• 9,803 average weekly steps
• 62 book pages read (Sunrise on the Reaping - p180-p242)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Good American Family
• Parenthood

• 🏛️ - A few times this week I found myself in topics about standards, compliance or regulations. This came up first as part of Project-R, but then also in two additional calls with customers. This included GDPR (and the DPDPA), PCI:DSS and the riveting handbook that is the FCA regulations. While I don’t pretend to be an expert in these areas, they come up so frequently that I think our portfolio needs to highlight them a lot more than it does today. Good insight, much reflection.
  
  

• 🚇 - I’ve had this niggling problem for a little while now about the best ways to visualise our portfolio to different stakeholders, especially when there is a lot of information to present. I could write a lot more words on this, maybe in a separate post, but on Tuesday I was reminded by one of my amazing marketing colleagues about the London tube map and how it solves this type of problem. I will certainly be thinking more about this for some portfolio representation in the future, but I also think I want to read more on its design, history and UX as it sounds fascinating.
  
  

• 👐🏻 - I was reminded again this week that there are things I have been working on that are now in a state of maturity, that they can and should be delegated, and the importance of staff enablement. That could be something I’ve written, something I’ve automated or decisions I make. Just like the calendar de-frag, this is a bit of an individual-contributor defrag, making sure that my own contribution is more about others than myself. Thankfully I have a great team around me who always keeps me on my toes and reminds me when it’s time, even if I forget occasionally.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 216 minutes of podcasts
• 6,795 average weekly steps
• 33 pages (Sunrise on the Reaping - p146-p179)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder - S01
• Bookish - S01
• Amy Bradley is missing
• Squid Game - S03

• 🚉 - Monday started with a trip to Bristol to visit a customer who’s under-going an RFI. Some good challenging questions and I left a little unsatisfied but I also left with a small pocket full of ideas, so I can’t complain.
  
  

• 🗄️ - This week also contained one of the longest RFIs I’ve ever worked on, in this case for a financial services organisation. The usual basic spreadsheet of many questions was also supplemented by a few hundred pages of additional content. All of this produced by our team and reviewed by me to bring it all together. It was an exciting one, and great to watch the team pull together for it, but wow! what a process. I actually hope we get through to RFP for this one because it’ll be a hell of a ride if this RFI is the teaser.
  
  

• 🖊️ - If that wasn’t enough, I thankfully managed to get more content for Project-R wrapped up. Like everyone at the moment, I’ll be going on leave in a couple of weeks so this is a mini-crunch time to try and get as much finished and all the loose ends tied up as I can. Thankfully I had a lot of energy this week to plough through.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 383 minutes of podcasts
• 11,736 average weekly steps
• 87 pages (Sunrise on the Reaping - p58-p145)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Poker Face - S02
• Too Much - S01
• Dept Q - S01

• 🏃🏻‍➡️ - If you’ve been paying attention for the past few weeks, you will have noticed that there has a marked decline in my step count since I acquired by manual treadmill. Well apparently this is quite common, but I was not happy about it. So I stated this week with a small change to my routine by getting up 1hr earlier to spend an extra hour on the treadmill, while watching something on Netflix, so I can get an extra 5k steps in. It’s been great, giving me a bit more of a boost before work and with the double-win of getting to watch a few more TV shows on my list.
  
  

• 📙 - Work started with some time reviewing this year learning and development strategy. A bit focus this year is on structure and validation. We now have some really good role-based learning paths, a good LMS and the ability to track the programme. Next step will be to review progress monthly and ensure everyone has enough time in their week to spend on their development.
  
  

• 📄 - This weeks technical/orgaisational challenge relates to design documents. We’re all done them, high-level designs and low-level designs are pretty typical in most of the work we do, sometimes to provide validation and reassurance (as we are an outsourced organisation) sometimes for compliance reasons. The most traditional downside to these documents in they age quickly. This weeks challenge was agreeing an approach where by these documents are kept up-to-date without the burden of daily versioning for every change. Lots more thoughts on this, both in terms of process and tooling. Maybe I should write another post on some of these things I’ve learnt.
  
  

• 🥂 - The week ended with the sales kick-off, a time when I usually present one or two things and in return I get to have a lot of conversations and gather a lot of peoples ideas. I usually come away with a lost of notes and follow-ups and this week was no different. Great BBQ, great company, good end to the week.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 405 minutes of podcasts
• 7,938 average weekly steps
• 108 pages (Sunrise on the Reaping - p0-p57)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Madame Blanc Mysteries - S03 + S04

• ⚡ - Monday, was one of those rare days where my Teams went into offline mode, my meetings were cleared (mostly) and I sent the day working on a few of my individual contributor activities. Most of this was some content for Project-R but I have to say, as I have mentioned in a previous weeknote, writing is an act of understanding. I thought I was facing a day or writing down well understood things out of my head and onto the page, however the process certainly raised some questions and now I have one or two things to go and get answers for.
  
  

• 🎓 - This week was kicking off R&D season again, a few weeks where we go back over the internal projects we’ve worked on over the past year with an external auditor. Not the most exciting, however it’s an important reflection point about just because something is internally useful doesn’t mean it’s R&D and doesn’t mean it’s particularly special. When we find those nuggets though it’s something we certainly should be talking more about.
  
  

• 👷🏼 - Wednesday was all about automation projects. I’ve been focusing for a couple of weeks on making sure we double-down on automation and integrations between systems - the big stuff, but this week I got a bit of time to hoover up through a long list of “little automation activities”. These are the things that may take someone an additional 10 seconds to do in a process e.g. fill in this extra fields or go and lookup this data but they are the type of thing that when done a few hundred times a day can really make a difference if fixed. Some of these are a bit of “self own” i.e. making people fill in data we should already known from information in other systems. It’s been good to speak to people on the front line of our services and get these little things priorities that make jobs easier and make our customer experience better.
  
  

• ⛑️ - Lifecycle management, the day-to-day means on handling technical debt has been a huge topic for us this year, really brought front and centre by all the recent very public cyber security events. Well, working for an MSP you can we have to deal with a lot of infrastructure that is less and perfect and this week I certainly had to have my fair share of difficult conversations about this topic. I honestly don’t mind that part, I’m just happy that it’s getting the attention it deserves and that we now have AI to help speed up the process a little.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 206 minutes of podcasts
• 4,752 average weekly steps
• 57 pages (Sunrise on the Reaping - p0-p57)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Madame Blanc Mysteries - S01 + S02

• 🗃️ - I started the week, returning to my previous work of change catalogues. The main aim being to ensure we don’t have any gaps, that all the things we manage have at least one known, standard change. There are a few gaps and it’s a bigger job than I was expecting but given it’s impact to all our customers it’s a useful exercise. Still work to be done over the next few weeks on this.
  
  

• 👦🏻 - This week we also had another intake of work experience people and I got the opportunity to talk to them and answer their questions for a couple of hours. This was quite fun and I’m always amazed about the standard of kids coming out of mainstream education. I don’t remember being as technically literate as they are now when I was their age, I was all energy and drive, but not as knowledgeable that’s for sure.
  
  

• 🎭 - I had the pleasure of taking a nice mid-week day off to attend Tim Minchin’s gig in Brighton. A picnic on beach, some cocktails and Ivy Asia and the gig in the evening. Honestly, wonderful and a break that I needed.
  
  

• 🏢 - Friday was one of our company town hall session, and I was in London presenting on portfolio and answering questions. The questions were good and it was commented how my presentations are always “animated” which I’ll take as a compliment. Take away from this is that I need to produce more content in different forms e.g. 1-pagers, small videos etc and that people want to hear more about all the things we doing more often. Good insight and good end to the week.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 388 minutes of podcasts
• 4,829 average weekly steps
• 30 book pages read (Murderbot - Systems Collapse now finished)
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Celebrity Race Across the World - S02
• America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders - S02

• ⛯ - I spend most of the week working on further portfolio writing, trying to get the first draft document completed before it goes off for further technical review and branding next week. The week concluded with the document done, and I’m pretty proud of the 15k words of it’s contents. I learn quite a bit a long the way in putting it together and I already have plenty of ideas for Vol #2.
  
  

• 📄 - In later half of the week I spent continuing my work on the Service Design document from last week. This is another one of those tasks where I am learning more in the process of writing it than I thought I would at the start. My knowledge of ITIL is pretty good, but there are so many implementation details, subtleties and edge cases that it really does take a good bit of design work to establish something that provides a positive customer experience. Not finished yet, but not dreading it either.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Severance - S02
• Traitors NZ - S02
• Supacell - S01

• 📄 - My week started working on Project-R working with the customer of their service design document. This is actually a lot more interesting than it sounds. The purpose is to take what’s in the contract, which can be seen as the red-lines of the service and start having deeper conversations about what they want the experience to look and feel like. It mostly involves conversations about scenarios, edge cases, previous experiences and KPIs. All of this then gets written down in a document that is shared and can be updated over time as both parties learn to work together.
  
  

• 🧩 - On Wednesday I went to Leeds for our first face to face meeting for Project-R. This is the first time I had met the customer representatives F2F despite having worked with them almost daily for the best part of a year. I really found it a useful experience and I’m reminded that whatever the distance that needs to be travelled, meeting people in-person with some regularity builds relationships that can help during difficult times. Don’t ever skip this stuff.
  
  

• 🤹 - I would say the week ended on a bit of a down note. Not because anything went wrong but because I had two days of near back-to-back meetings where 50% of them were 15-20 minute status update or decision meetings. Not in itself a problem, I love to see a 15m meeting vs the default 30m as it really focuses everyone, however when they are back to back it can be quite wearisome.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 653 minutes of podcasts ⬇️
• 5,445 average weekly steps ⬇️
• 15 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Sirens - S01
• Race Across the World - S05
• Celebrity Race Across the World - S01

• 🪂 - Tuesday I was meeting a customer in Manchester. It was a sales meeting, but one to a very technical audience so very much no B*S. It was a session that could have stalled the relationship just as easily as it could have extended it. It didn’t go exactly as expected but we walked away with not one, but two opportunities. Just reminds me that sometimes despite hard work and plenty of relationship building, a touch a luck also helps.
  
  

• 🔑 - PIM and PAM are two staples of secure access management to customer environments. This week I had to facilitate a discussion on our PIM implementation for access to our AWS customer environments. A 6-step process, spanning 3 systems. Yes, it’s secure and yes it’s the right thing to do but the engineer-experience of actually having to access systems is more than a bit painful. If this isn’t the death of ClickOps I don’t know what will be.
  
  

• 🗃️ - This week I also started expanding on the topic of our Change Catalogue. A core element of any managed services portfolio, this week I facilitated some conversations about expanding our change catalogue, automating more of it and talking to customers about moving more change into standard click-button changes.
  
  

• 🎢 - RFPs. That sometimes out of nowhere sales activity that typically involves filling in a spreadsheet with hundreds of questions. I have a love/hate relationship with these things. I hate the ones copy-n-pasted from three different RFPs aimed and three different types of organisations - it’s just lazy procurement. I hate the ones that want you to do design work for free. I love the ones that ask difficult or awkward questions that force me to look at how we operate and I love the ones that include requirements for large parts of our portfolio because it makes me think about how it all fits together. This week was only one portfolio item, and I had two days to do it, but it was well written and I learnt some stuff doing it.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 304 minutes of podcasts ⬇️
• 5,700 average weekly steps ⬆️
• 10 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Last of Us - S02
• Ginny & Georgia - S03

• ☁️ - I spent some time this week discussing our IaC set-up this week, except this time it was about our VMware private cloud environment. I go back and forth on the value of IaC (I almost wrote a blog a few weeks ago on its decline) and there has certainly been less attention, from us and from customers, in managing private cloud with IaC. Well we’ve been pushing this forward as part of bringing consistency across our services. I have some good meetings with the team this week discussing all the edge cases and how we handle them.
  
  

• 🌼 - On Wednesday I was back in the London office to meet with the AWS account manager of one of our most important customers. It was a great session and part of re-igniting our relationship with AWS. Certainly lots to think about, but also reassuringly not much has changed in how to get the most out of working with AWS. The usual topics - POCs, MAP, marketplace, professional services. I’m even giving some thought to formatting some of our roadmap of services into PRFAQs (wonder if I could get ChatGPT to help with this?).
  
  

• 🖇️ - Some time was spent this week working with our product, technical and brand teams on some of our document templates. A little boring for some, but when lots of what we do is professional services then this is one of the ways with which we increase the standards and quality of the output of our work. There is also a little bit of technical design work that also goes into these templates so it’s really a collective effort.
  
  

• ⚒️ - We had the first dedicated working group on our automation activities. Like any engineering organisation, we’ve been automating the work we do for years but it’s always been in small pockets, individual people or side-projects from each team. This week we started a working group to bring together all the individuals and align all the work to specific portfolio services, my focus is making sure everyone is pulling in the same direction. It was an exciting session for me,getting to sit back and see the vast array of ideas and skills across the teams. If we deliver all of the things on our roadmap for the next 6-months then we’ll be 100% better managed service business than we were 12-months ago.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 881 minutes of podcasts ⬇️
• 5,300 average weekly steps ⬆️
• 10 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Ginny & Georgia - S02
• Doctor Who - S15

• ⭐ - My appraisal. If you’ve read any of my blogs or weeknotes, you’ll know I’m pretty good at being reflective. I think I generally have a pretty fair and balanced view of myself and my performance so I wasn’t really expecting too much out of my appraisal. I was pleasantly surprised to receive a more positive response than I had judged myself again - which was a nice mid-week boost. I feel I’ve worked pretty hard this year on a number of professional and personal fronts and it was nice to have that acknowledged. Next onto goals.
  
  

• 🫶🏻 - New potential partners AWS and AI. Building partner relationships is a bit of a complex beast (maybe a blog post in here on this one) but I got the pleasure of meeting two new potential partners this week. One AWS focused partner that I am very excited about, not only because of their technology and customer base but also because of their relationship with AWS which could really enhance and boost our own. The second partner was a follow-up from a contact I may in Dubai, who has an interesting LLM operations and testing tool that I am very excited to get to play with a bit more. Exciting to build these into our plans for new services.
  
  

• ⛯ - Roadmap - part 4 - the tech radar. So the portfolio journey continues. This time re-writing my previous work into it’s final customer-facing format. I don’t like roadmaps (for reasons I’ll blog about soon), so I was focused on using a variation on the Thoughtworks Tech Radar format which I have found is a great format for presenting portfolio in terms of lifecycle, customer adoption and why. It’s not been the easiest to put together and will likely take me at least another week to complete and get final review but it’s been a great exercise with lot of additional learning, even with all the previous weeks preparation I have done. If you’re responsible for product or portfolio then I strongly recommend it.
  
  

    Edit: (06-Sept-2025) I have added the post on why I don’t like roadmaps

• 🪴 - Gardening. Something that I normally have to do at this time of year just like everyone else, gardening a worked it’s way into my weekdays as well as my weekends. Given that we’re had come very busy weekends over the past few months, the garden has become my very own jungle with knee length grass and large patches of brambles several feet deep. So my week has been chipping away at this problem 30 minutes at time until it’s gets back into a state where we can see the whole garden again. Exhausting work, but satisfying progress.s
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 1104 minutes of podcasts 😲
• 4,600 average weekly steps ⬇️ 😔
• 5 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Grey’s Anatomy - S21
• Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story
• Ginny & Georgia - S01

• 🦩 - Sales training. One day in the London office and one day in the Leeds office. Working with out sales teams on how to sell our cloud portfolio as a solution sell alongside other portfolio areas. Also, reviewing some competitors and some example sales scenarios. I always enjoy doing these sorts of things because it gives me a temperature check for our sales teams and I always get new questions and sometimes things I hadn’t considered.
  
  

• ⛯ - Roadmap - part 3. Presenting the roadmap work to Charles and some of the other senior leadership team. It’s a key step to get buy in for the investments we’re trying to make and the portfolio areas we’re focusing on. It was a good session, with some good feedback and where some clarification is required. More to come on this next week, as I start to expand out on the structure, and the why.
  
  

• 🀚 - Backup and DR automation. I’ve been having some interesting conversations this week about the current state of backup and disaster recovery tooling, automation and the customer experience. This has nothing to do with the recent very public M&S incident, but it certainly made me reflect on how seriously organisations take these processes. There will be another full blog post on this soon, but the TLDR is there still a lot of innovation to be done on this space, for these services to achieve the outcomes that people expect that they already do.
  
  

• 🤔 - Appraisal time. Yes, it’s that time of year again when I reflect on my own perform and the performance of others. Did I meet my objectives? Were they the right ones? What’s next? Some years this feels like a bit of a ticket box exercise, but this might be the first year in a quite a while where both I and by colleagues are taking it a bit more seriously. This means having a lot more, meaningful deeper conversations that aren’t rushed and objectives are set based on business outcomes and personal reflection.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 506 minutes of podcasts
• 8,129 average weekly steps
• 0 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Race Across The World - S02 + S03

• 🇦🇪 - The most of this week was all about the Dubai FinTech Summit. I flew out on Sunday for this event we were sponsoring to talk to people on our stand. I was also there to do some panel discussions, community interviews and some dinners with some customers. I’d been preparing for a week for this but I really wasn’t prepared for the experience. Dubai is like nothing else - in culture, in opportunity, in inspiration. Landed home on Wednesday and I’ll be thinking about and discussing this for weeks to come. I’ll be writing up a specific blog post on this shortly.
  
  

    Edit: (19-Apr-2025) I have added the post on this event here

• ⛯ - Roadmap - part 2. Continuing on from the roadmap work in weeknote #57 I spend the week working on the product roadmap for FY26. Current scope is just the one-year horizon view. I will expand on this over the coming weeks for the 3-5 year horizon views.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 430 minutes of podcasts
• 8,735 average weekly steps
• 3 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• This City is Ours - Season 01
• James Acaster: Hecklers Welcome

• 🪢 - Had all the team leaders for tech practice, together F2F this week. It was brief but it’s nice to see everyone together discussing employee feedback and plans for the next FY.
  
  

• 💡 - This week I started a series of career coaching sessions with a colleague who feels they are in a bit of rut. This is my opportunity to expand on my coaching experience, using existing tools and techniques from my own coaching experience. I’m not often on this side of the coaching table in such a formal/structured manner. On this occasion I’ll get to explore if this is something I want to do more of in my career all the while helping someone else with theirs.
  
  

• 🧹 - Project R ticks along, all while doing its best to fill my calendar. This week was a lot of running around the edges, dealing with small internal projects, providing clarity of the scope and potential changes and monitoring how well the discovery process is progressing.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 257 minutes of podcasts
• 9,703 average weekly steps
• 5 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Race Across The World - S01

• 🚸 - Started the week with an introduction session with our new work experience folks. Giving a “this is what we do” presentation but without all the industry-speak was quite refreshing. The questions I got were inspiring and I really got a kick of out talking to these teenagers at the start of their journey. I really must do this more.
  
  

• 🟢 - We’re got a few batches of new joiners across the business over the next few weeks and I’ve been involved in their inductions. Presenting what the technology teams do is one thing, but I also got lots of general business questions which was fun. I don’t think I ever get bored of these types of things. While I hope our new joiners get some useful knowledge, I also find that I get a good sense check of the rest of our process based upon the types of questions that get asked.
  
  

• ⛯ - Starting a very specific set of activities on putting together our FY26 roadmap. This includes all elements, proposition, product and lifecycle management. This week I had a deep-dive session on proposition - that are the big bets we’re going to make, what product bundling and what verticals we’re targeting and why. Good conversation and useful output that customers will get to see at the end of the month.
  
  

• 🏉 - The weekend is all about U12 Rugby - a full weekend away tour. Very loud, very busy, very fun. Quality family time.
  
  

📈 - This weeks stats:

• 227 minutes of podcasts
• 10,317 average weekly steps
• 0 book pages read
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Threads - The 1984 film, for which they are due to make a series. If you haven’t watched this - do it! Wow!

• 🏠 - Spent some time focused on tidying the house, boxing things to move into storage and throwing things into a hired skip. Preparing the house ready to put onto the market. We’ve lived here for 8 years now so we’re accumulated a lot. It will take longer than a week but it’s a good start.
  
  

• 📚 - I’ve also been reading a lot this week. That included not only catching up on a lot of articles but also reading some of the longer white papers I’ve been meaning to get to. I’ve also put a couple of magazines into my rotation which has been refreshing. I’ve been pretty bad at my fiction reading the past few months so I’ve spent some time catching up on that and I’m adding it to the stats part of the weeknotes so see how I get on.
  
  

📊 - This weeks stats:

• 17 podcast episodes listen to.
• 3,762 average steps 😞

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Everyone Else Burns
• The Stolen Girl
• Small Town, Big Story
• Gangs of London - S03
• Yellowstone - S01
• Silo - S02

• 👥 - Throughout the week I have been having 1:1s with each of the tech practice leaders. I have this on a monthly cadence anyway, but this was a special call out to support them with their roadmap development. As each of them were being asked to present to the UK MD for the first time, this was also a moment of anxiety for them for which I was being asked to coach them through. This was also key to my own role and involvement in the coming weeks where I was being asked to stitch their ideas into a single co-ordinated plan. It was also my opportunity to better gauge the level of product experience and strategic thinking each had as some have never been asked to step up outside of their more traditional operational roles.
  
  

• 📃 - Also had the opportunity to review a couple of new service descriptions this week for some things the engineering teams had been working on. Again, given that we’re trying to give the senior engineers more responsibility of developing the service ideas and writing the first service description drafts this was a good opportunity for me to determine the levels of experience and identify those areas of improvement. That includes coaching them on what’s required but also something for me on making the process easier and better communicating those details and decisions that I take for granted.
  
  

• 🏠 - The remainder of the week will be some much needed R&R and to catch up on some reading before my next week of leave where I’ll be doing lots of jobs around the house.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Black Mirror - S07

• 📓 - I’ve noticed that writing these weeknotes week after week acts a bit like an anonymous accountability buddy where I am encouraged throughout the week to take a little note of the meaningful things I did so that I can write them up at the end. This means I am thinking about a few other things that I might want to include here in the future: what I am listening to, what games I am playing, my health stats from the week. I’m not sure exactly when or where these will fit in but I am certainly thinking about adding more detail over time.
  
  

• 🧰 - The first thing on my list for the week has been going deep on the topic of legacy OS automation. We’ve got a couple of customer engagements at the moment where there is a diverse range of end-of-support operating systems that need to be upgraded. Depending on the age, some of these are not trivial to automate and upgrade. As we’ve been doing this for a while, we have lot of pockets of good information and scripts available but we’re now at a point where this need to be brought together and tested. I spent this week coming up with a plan for this. This was more exciting for me to work on that it might be for others because I love dealing with the heritage things.
  
  

• ➰ - I got my first demo of Loopio that we’ll be rolling out to support our bid team. This is great and another way for us to centralise our knowledge and speed up our customer responses. I’m also expecting gaps to appear that I can work with our technical leaders to fill.
  
  

• 💬 - I got asked to write proposals for a couple of talks this week for events we’re sponsoring. Having not spoken in public for a while this was a refreshing change of case. One for an iGaming event in London and anther for a FinTech event in Dubai. AI and cyber security are both the topics of the day here. The challenge as always is not the technical topic but making it something relevant to the industry vertical and audience there rather than something generic. Well, I’ve had some good ideas and hopefully they think so too.
  
  

• 💵 - An odd little note on Azure billing this week - we’re expanding to be a indirect partner in the US (hopefully direct partner soon after) and it’s been a lot more complicated than it should have been - literally days. Combinations of getting the right tenancy, the right office address, proving domain ownership and many tickets to Microsoft. We’re only doing this because we have a few international customers who want to transact in the US as opposed to any significant plans for US expansion - but it was good to see it happen anyway.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Say Nothing

🌀 - Spent some time this week thinking through some requirements for our customer facing portals. It’s part of my wider strategy to really enhance this customer interaction point while also maintaining a human feel for the service. This week has been filtering out ideas of functionality being developed across the business and how that might look and feel when presented to the customer in an integrated way. I don’t put my BA/Product manager/design hats on often but when I do, it is something I enjoy.

🎥 - On film twice this week, both internal, but one as we’re rolling out some sales training for which I was involved in the webinar and secondly being professionally recorded by our brand team for some management training we’re developing. Always good fun, preparing and running through these activities. Despite the serious topics, lots of laughs were had.

🎁 - Birthday week. Which means my weekend will now be playing with my Anbernic rg40xxv and re-living my youth.

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Running Point - S01
• Death in Paradise - S14
• Adolescence

• 💰 - Project-R - the beast of a project that dominated my working life and these weeknotes for the past six months, has finally signed. After the moment of excitement, now the real work begins. This is really my only note of the week as everything else has been wrapped around this, internal project calls, resourcing calls, internal kick-offs, tooling and systems calls, CapEx and procurement calls. It’s been a sea of calls and the engine of this thing gets moving. As a five-year contract, this is coming to be something that dominates the years to come and I’m excited to find out all the oddities along the way.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Residence
• Reacher - S03
• Last One Laughing - S01

• 🎿 - The days are spent skiing in the morning, followed by workshops and other team-based activities until the late evening. Almost every minute of the day, from breakfast time, taxi transfers and workshop agendas is tightly organised, and with 30 people there that is somewhat of a miracle.
  
  

I came back dehydrated with aches, pains and bruises but with a long list of ideas and a schedule of other sessions to work through upon my return.

• 🚌 - Got verbal confirmation from the CEO that Project-R is going ahead. This meant the week was full of calls preparing everyone for what’s to come, introducing people to the project who haven’t been involving and getting engineering assigned to the engagement. With a project of this size this also meant ensuring everyone was calm, despite the challenges, and hopefully they fed off my confidence.
  
  

• ⚙️ - Had come great conversations with our internal systems teams this week. I never forget how important it is for our internal systems to be treated in the same way as our customer projects, so I had some roadmap conversations with each of the internal systems teams this week about improving CX, better integration and adding some functionality that’s going to have a massive impact on the engineering experience for delivering Project-R. This includes improvements to our CMDB, our migration tooling and our customer portal.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• What we do in the shadows - S06

• 🧰 - On Monday, I had a great session with our development team working on our migration and modernisation tooling. As you can image, migrations, replacements and upgrades of software and infrastructure are something we do every day. Sometimes this is a big thing, as part of a big project but sometimes this is simply a single VM or PaaS solution. As we do this across many platforms, we’ve spent the past few years building out our own tooling for this purpose and to encode some of our many hard-won lessons. This week I got to see the latest update on this, with some great integrations with our managed service tooling, some excellent improvements to help our project managers on larger projects and better support for evidence gathering when working on projects with external auditors. As the initial sponsor of this project many years ago, I always get a kick to see it continue to make progress.
  
  

• 🧑‍💻 - Tuesday I got to have two 1:1 sessions with a couple of team leads at our customer. These are discovery sessions for me where I let people tell me their problems, their priorities and we discuss ways I can help. Technical conversations between technical people with no selling. I absolutely love getting time to do these types of sessions with customers and it really helps me build stronger relationships, manage politics and make sure our services continue to be interesting and developing quickly enough.
  
  

• 🚧 - Middle part of the week was discussions about disaster recovery, one of those serendipitous moments when product are talking about a topic at the exact same time as an important customer. Disaster Recovery in a large part of the industry and for many of our customers hasn’t really changed from the fail-over and audit tick box exercise of the past twenty years. Suffice to say I have lot of thoughts on what needs to improve here and there is a long email on the topic that I need to turn into a blog post at some point.
  
  

• 🚦 - Project-R rolls on in the background, but aside from a few hours of document tweaks it was a pretty calm week. It’s certain the calm before the storm and I’ve been having plenty of internal conversations about people nervous of what is to come. Keeping calm and carrying on.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Dexter - Original Sin
• White Lotus - S02

• 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 - The week started with some new management training and part of a new program being rolled out. This wouldn’t normally be something of note, as regular management training, be that internal or external is just business-as-usual but in this case it was notable because unlike much of the previous training I have been a part of, this is a new program taking all managers though start HR policies, but is delivered by specialist employment lawyers. What I really liked about this was it took was is typically very stale content and brought it to life in terms of discussions about edge-cases, particular scenarios and what has been learnt from the lawyers experience of employment tribunals and mistakes made by other organisations. While I’m very familiar with our policies, I still learnt a lot from this.
  
  

• 🛣️ - Monday, also included another review of the product roadmap and some discussions about the FY26 plans. Very excited with how this is being managed now and some of the things that are un-coming. Themes are: simplified and integrated. Less Argos catalogue, more car brochure. Lots more security and applications services. It’s not all perfect though, still need to focus more of writing down the strategy, not just the roadmap and also improving our lifecycle management to kill off some older services that are not very profitable.
  
  

• 📜 - Most of the week, was Project-R, the last crunch mode of the contracting phase. I’ll admit this also destroyed me mentally. Tuesday to Thursday, I started at 8 and finished at 6, with a 2-hour meeting in the morning and a 4-hour meeting in the afternoon. Live-editing contracts and reviewing with the customer line-by-line. I remember having this same crunch mode period four years ago with another large customer but it’s easy to forget how difficult that was too. A friend called this my version of the Olympics and as amusing as that is, it’s probably pretty accurate as I only do these sorts of size projects on that similar cadence. By the end of the week, when the documents were done, there was a huge sense of relief and a massive sense of achievement. Fingers crossed all this work pays off for the next five-years.
  
  

• 🔐 - Friday, was a trip to London to have a deep-dive on the cyber security roadmap deep-dive. Firstly, having some face-to-face time with a number of colleagues after the crunch time of the week I’ve had was a nice reprieve. I had to opportunity to be presented the current thinking on our cyber security strategy, which was great and gave me tonnes to think about. It wasn’t just a long list of new services, but much more thinking had gone on in terms of which vendors we work with, how we integrate services better into our other portfolio, how do refresh penetration testing and where we’re investing our development time in building new cyber security IP. When I say lots to think about I mean, this has been one of those sessions where I walk away with pages of notes and walk away excited. I mean seriously - what I great way to end the week.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• High Potential - S01
• White Lotus - S01
• The Recruit - S02
• Am I being unreasonable - S02

• 👥 - Like bookends to my week I got to have a couple of really good conversations this week with some ex-colleagues this week. The first occurring on Tuesday, with someone whom I’m hoping will come back and work with us (but an honest conversation not a sales pitch). The second with one of my favourite ex-colleagues who’s been a bit of a management mentor to me over this years. This was one of our monthly informal catch-ups and after the week of boredom and frustration he certainly helped me enter the week in a positive mood.
  
  

• 🌐 - Starting at the weekend and drip feeding over the next few weeks, I am still making some adjustments to this site. It started at the weekend when I started moving my Mastodon posts to /snippets and following up with beginning to move bookmarks over there as well. Lots still to do like Bluesky posts and old Twitter posts, but it’s really coming along and just keeps me working in this repository (see /changelog for more). I feel at this point that any writing is good writing.
  
  

• 📜 - This week’s Project-R update was brought to you by copy and paste, live editing and GenAI. Spent a lot of hours copy and pasting information between documents, using GenAI to make small amends and act as my peer-reviewer/editor and being on hours of calls live reviewing/editing documents with a customer. Mentally challenging for many reasons.
  
  

• 👨‍💻 - I ended the week spending some time coming back to a bit of an old project - managed services. We’ve been doing a lot recently to improve our managed services and make them feel more modern and increase visibility in what happens inside a managed service. I’ve starting thinking more about this again - how to move the conversation beyond ITIL. Great, you’re an ITIL-based mutli-tier MSP, so what? What’s next? That’s the question I am trying to answer properly. There is likely one or two blog posts coming on this over the next few months.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Amandaland - S01
• White Lotus - S01
• This Way Up

Yo Dawg! I heard you like milestones …

• 🛠️ Spent another day in London, this time for a multi-hour workshop with a large customer in the insurance industry. Not calling it too early but this one might be another one of those that I end up talking about in future weeknotes with my usual Project- prefix. It was a good session, talking about everything from Cloud, workplace functionality, remote working, digital apps and legacy problems. Hopefully gave lots of value but as always cam away with plenty of thing about. It was good to spent a day thinking about a new customer rather than having my head buried in the usual one.
  
  

• 📝 Had a good 2-hour session with the Digital Apps practice, working on service description(s). This was more of a coaching session to support them in turning their ideas into something we can sell. Having not done this much before this was a session to get them thinking about what’s important in a service, how they are constructed, what should be included, what language to use etc. I also took away some great notes that I will use in future GPT prompts to help improve how we do this. I think all GPT prompts should be created this way - developed, shared and battled tested with questions and scenarios from beginners not experts.
  
  

• 💰 One of the areas I have been meaning to get back into is the financial part of our business. Over the years I’ve spent time in this area, working through budgets, commercial models and even helped with the odd bit of invoicing but it’s not my day-to-day and like all knowledge it atrophies over time. So I spent a great hour of 1:1 time with our CFO this week doing a deep-dive on our financial information and how the business (both UK and Group) functions. I’ve always through the more I know about this, the more I can advocate for more people to have this understanding but also I can do the things that make our finance team’s jobs a little bit easier.
  
  

• 🧑🏻 On Friday, I had a coaching session. This is a personal session, for which I’m helping a family friend achieve her coaching apprenticeship, but the value I’ve been getting from these has been great. It’s having someone to bounce some ideas off about how to achieve my personal goals, build habits and to do so sustainably. Lots of notes, plenty small actions and while not making as much progress as I would like I’m certainly making more progress than I think I would be without it.
  
  

• 📜 Project-R - this week’s Project-R update was all about the milestones. Is this milestone too big or too small? Are there too many milestones? Do we do them all in order or not? Are all the deliverable items clear for each one? More discussions, more writing, more planning. If you’re having project problems I feel bad for you son, I got 99 milestones but a wave ain’t one.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• The Rig - S02
• Sick Note

• 📝 This weeks side quest involved reviewing SLAs. This included identifying gaps, looking at improvements but more critically, doing a lot of scenario planning of where multiple SLAs could compound upon each other. I’ve added a note to write some of this up as a blog post in the next few weeks.
  
  

• 📜 This weeks Project-R update is the long slog of legal back and forth, hunting down potential issues and risks (what we would call bugs - but I’ve come to refer to as Easter eggs), they’ll likely be more of this for a few weeks. As I’m learning more about the legal writing process I’m building up a small GPT prompt to act as my self reviewer and to document the guardrails. I’ll definitely be doing more of this, both on this project but also on a couple more large ones we have in the pipeline, so having something like this to help others will be time well spent.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Agatha All Along - I’m not usually a Marvel watching person but I found this based on recommendation and it was a very good one-off season. This might encourage me to dip my toe a little more into the Marvel tv-universe.
  
  

🎭 - Extra entertainment

• Dear Evan Hansen - I’d been meaning to see this musical for a long time, and this week finally got the chance. So very glad I did and very worthy of all the awards it has achieved. Joyous, Funny, and heartfelt. I’d certainly watch this a few more times.

• 🏛️ Another day in London, this time to spend some time talking about org structure and operating models. Putting my strategy hat on for a little while. In a growing business with growing teams sometimes you have to step away from the operational day to day and spend some time discussing the pinch points of your organisation. Often things grow and move organically in an engineering org and often customer needs will move faster than any structure can reposition itself. This week we took some time to try and think 2 or 3 steps ahead about where we want to be and what an org would look like if we got there. It was a conversation that was sometimes awkward, sometimes surprising but definitely fun and very useful but the sort of thing that you can’t do unless you have a close team that trusts each other.
  
  

• 🪪 We had a great internal workshop on Wednesday about identity and access management services. Once upon a time it was all managed AD and VPNs but now we’re handling zero-trust and M365 and there is so much to do in this space that it’s quite exciting. I’ll admit this is not one of my specific areas of expertise so it was great to sit back, listen and watch a team of engineers whiteboard their way to some exciting new positional customer offers.
  
  

• 📜 It wouldn’t be a 2025 weeknote if I didn’t mention Project-R. This week was focused on writing the contract for our migration services. Having written a contract of a similar size and format a few years ago I had a little bit of material to crib from. This week however was also just as much about talking to various teams about various activities and edge-cases as it was about getting the raw words on the page. I certainly learnt quite a bit about some services I hadn’t been close to for a while. Again, another 10k words, which is mentally hard to get down on a page, but the lessons that come from it I wouldn’t have it any other way.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Intelligence - S01-03 - accidental find, GCHQ workplace comedy. Reminds me a bit of W1A.

• 📜 Project-R continues to extract words from my brain like silvery strands from a Harry Potter memory charm. This week was a quick 10k words of contractual text describing our managed services. Definitions, obligations, we will do this, we may do this, we require you to do this other thing from time to time. I don’t know how lawyers do this every day - exhausting. Having said that I did spend some time writing a couple of use AI prompts, one which reviews my work and the other which drafts definitions for me. Not perfect to useful and certainly re-usable.
  
  

• ⚙️ I was also involved in a customer presentation on Tuesday which included demos as well as the usual barrage of questions. Having lots of questions I can understand, people want to know what they are buying, but it’s rare for customers to want to see demos of how we do what we do. I was thinking more about it as we were preparing for it and I really couldn’t understand why some customers want to see behind the curtain of a service they are buying and want to see how we deliver services to them and what tools we use. When was the last time you got on a call with your electricity company and asked - can you show me exactly how you get that power from the wind turbine to power my TV and can you show me all the tools?
  
  

🎥 - This weeks background entertainment: Usually my evening entertain in TV, however we had run out of things we wanted to watch so this weeks background entertainment was a string of films from the 90s - surprisingly many of which I had never actually seen before

• Flatliners
• Point break
• Tank Girl
• Sixth Sense
• Seven
• So I married an axe murderer
• Sliding Doors
• Happy Gilmore

• 📜 Project-R continues to fill my week, I’m coming to terms with the fact at this project is going to be one projects upon which many other improvements hang-off from. I guess it’s sort of like having a development branch in your GitHub repository, where lots of stuff happens every day and then you cherry-pick the best bits for your main branch (that being the rest of the business in this very stretched analogy). Well, this week’s Project-R side-quest has been working on services descriptions - nothing new but making sure any relevant service descriptions are on the latest templates, any that have pending updates are completed and that Project-R get the best versions of these things included.
  
  

• 🏛️ I was in London for a town hall session on Wednesday. Unlike in previous stages on my career I don’t go to these things to find out what’s going on, nor on this occasion was I presenting anything. This time I go to them to be in-person with everyone else. I find that on town hall days that people have lots of questions or they ask questions in the session and it gives them momentum and ideas to ask more later. Any time I’m in person in an office I seem to be a magnet for people asking questions or asking for help and it’s my absolute pleasure. Also, town halls are very different in a private company than they are in a public company, you get to be more honest about what’s working well and what’s not, plus the questions are much more direct.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Ludwig - S01 - binged it, loved every second of it.
• The Departure - S01 - the first season was great, but the two episodes into the second season I had to give up.

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Playing Nice
• Squid Game - S02

• 🧹 - The start of the year, is one of those time when it feels appropriate to do a bit of a clean up. Perhaps it’s due to the large volume of rubbish from Christmas but it encourages me to throw away other things unused and to deep clean rooms to make space. There is also a psychological element that means a clean space puts you in the right head space to start the new year.
  
  

• 🎯 - I’m not one for setting new years resolutions but I certainly like to review goals and objectives and the start of the year seems the perfect time to do so. Nothing new or exciting this year - more building on the habits and patterns of last year which seems to have been going well so far. Having a split week between work and time off means that I’ve also had the opportunity to review both personal and professional goals at the same time and side-by-side. Following on from my process of putting things on this site and therefore out in public, I will be doing so soon with some of this material.
  
  

• 🏢 - Thursday and Friday were the first days back to work and with most other staff still on leave it was a nice slow start to the year and opportunity for a bit of planning and organising. My plan started with reviewing my scheduled meetings making sure I was spending the right amount of time with the right people and more importantly how much face-time I was getting. I also did a bit of product planning, reviewing the roadmap and writing a new service description draft and a couple of RFPs.
  
  

📺 - This weeks background entertainment:

• Black Doves
• Ted Lasso

It’s Christmaaaaaaas! Well, that’s about it really and rightly so.

The traditional large family events on the 26th and 27th - 20 people squeezed into our house.

Managed to catch up on some reading and binged watched Bad Sisters.

Expect a little more next week.

• I started the week looking at our Customer Experience roadmap - this is the roadmap of services and improvements for all the foundational elements of our products and services - projects management, service management, ITIL managed services, collaboration. All of these things services and the direct touch-points with our customers and I’ve been spending a lot of time with our managed services team ensuring that all these services are the best they can be, that they are well written down and we’ve got good roadmap of all the improvements we want to make. I’m really excited for the things coming in this area.

• In addition, I spend some time with our product team this week looking at the product roadmap as a whole. The main questions I’m trying to answer here are: are we balancing improvements with new? How much are the team delivering and can we improve flow? Additionally, are the things we delivering across all the product areas well integrated with each other, so that we’re providing outcomes not the Argos catalogue (yes, that’s a dated reference)?

• I spend my last working day of the year on two personal topics - my H2 planning and my CY25 communication plan. Looking at the key things I want to achieve - re-launching our Digital Apps portfolio and expanding on engineering-led sales. Also looking at who I want to achieve those things with - how often I am meeting those up, down and across the business and how often are they F2F? I am certainly planning a little bit more F2F time this year and I’ve noticed that no only do others find it useful for me to be more obviously available but if I find the right balance of office visits then I am motivated by them rather than exhausted by them. This reflection time was a great way for me to conclude the working week and prepare myself for the new year.

This weeks background entertainment:

• Queer Eye - S9
• No Good Deed

Also this week was my annual tradition of:

• London International Horse Show

• Our FCA regulated customer had an external audit with us, so I got to team up again with our compliance team. Thankfully, our compliance team are awesome, have done this sort of thing many times before and have a lot of content and answers pre-prepared. I was really there to provide customer-specific context. These types of session are often multi-hour long sessions, go through line-by-line a long spreadsheet of questions. I do these sorts of things 3-4 times a year, and while it might be easy to think otherwise, I don’t recent doing them for a second. For the difficult ones, I enjoy the challenge of finding the right evidence in the correct format (sometimes writing it) and for the easy ones I enjoy the confidence it brings on thinking that other people can see how good we are at our jobs. This week’s one was certainly the later and probably the quickest and easiest one I’ve done to-date, which proves we are making progress. However, as always there are one or two things where I think the content could have been easier to put together or more joined up.

• Having spent some time on cost-models last week, this week was another deep dive into the Excel lake, but this time for Project-R. Assisting a few others who had put this model together, going through all the assumptions, all the scenarios, all the costs. All for the typical very-tight deadline. Having been the lead on a project like this myself in 2020/21, I vividly remember the stress that comes with it, the mistakes made, the version after version. My role this week as to assume nothing, question everything and provide some emotional support through the process.

• Continuing on from last weeks escapades in cloud reporting, this week was more Azure focused than AWS. Looking at end-of-life reporting. To my surprise, we don’t have many things running out of date versions for our Azure customers (really surprising - ask me another time about when we got windows 20003 running on Azure) but it was a good exercise none-the-less.

This weeks background entertainment:

• Grey’s Anatomy - S21

• Having spent many times over the past few years deep in the belly of excel and breaking down (and justifying) costs for very small assets/activities, well this week was no different. This was one of those where I’m reflecting of methods of pricing - per asset? per environment? cost-plus? Do you want us to management this? Do we need to manage this? If we manage X and Y are we double-charging for Z. Why is this thing cheaper than last year, but this other thing is more expensive? All of these questions are things where I have to bring my technical brain, my financial brain and my sales experience to try and reach the best outcome for both the company and the customer all while often dealing with non-technical procurement folks. Challenging, certainly but I do love this sort of thing because it can go in any direction. It’s also great to test what you thought was a good model with audience who doesn’t know all the detail - lots more takeaways on this.

• We have a few customers who are regulated by the FCA/PRA. One thing that we have to do is always make sure that the services we are provided for them meet those regulatory requirements. I had another opportunity to do that with a customer this week. As is often the case the customer takes responsibility for some elements themselves (or via other third-parties) so the main focus was to review the customers contract with them, re-evaluate if it had everything in it they needed and ensure that they were receiving everything as described. Thankfully there were no fires to put out (this week), however these conversations certainly bring the compliance topic back to the top of my list. When delivering services, it’s really important to only to say “we’re compliant - he’s the badge” but also provide all the content required to demonstrate it in an easily consumable fashion. To-date we’re been good at providing the assets to meet compliance (mostly reporting evidence) but we’re not providing the “X compliance control maps to Y element of our service” which means we’re often having to do this every time. Again another great example of customer conversation that leads to service improvement.

• A slightly odd one for me this week, slightly out of my skill set - Informix. We have a small niche in providing IBM Informix database support and even more niche, we have examples of running it on AWS. Somewhat out of the blue I ended up discussing Informix with two separate customers this week - one on AWS and one not. It’s great to have these little pockets of technical capability and also let me step back and learn from engineers who know this much better than me.

• A bit more writing again this week, in helping one of our Technical Service Managers update their service description. Great for me to come at this with some fresh eyes, provide feedback and help the service manager navigate through our product development process for the first time.

Getting me through the week:

• Joan
• Heartstopper - S03

• I started the week re-reading the corporate blog to get a better feel for the content. Aside from the usual product marketing I think it’s important for engineers to contribute to an organisations public output, as it’s something that helps instil good writing practice and explaining complex technical topics in a straightforward way to a diverse audience. I was reviewing the content from different engineers to get an idea about the types of content we were publishing but also the style, both visual and written. I enjoyed spending the time reading some of the posts I’d missed when they were originally posted and it was an opportunity to work with out marketing team to think more about the guidelines we use to provide consistency the editing and output. I am also going to be taking away some ideas about how to encourage more engineers in the organisation to write down their ideas and things they have been working on.

• As my journey with product development continues, this week I was working with one of our teams who develop the “Fusion” tool we use to link different ITSM solutions. This is a tool that is a key part of both our internal operations but also our customer experience and how we integrate our customers tooling with our own. My job this week was to speak to the team developing it, review all their content and write it down into a more formalised service description that makes it easier to sell and understand. This is a good example for me of learning-by-writing.

• I also continued writing reporting code this week for out cloud environments (both AWS and Azure). The aim of this reporting is always to make sure we’re doing all the things we should be doing as part of the service, but also providing reporting that helps us assess the impact to existing customers of adding new things. This week I was focused on “missing tags”. You could argue that this is pretty basic, but actually, the APIs for this are not great and there are a lot of taggable resources (like policies) that are easily missed by a tagging standard. This type of reporting allows us to make sure out tagging standard is rolled out consistently but also find taggable resources that we may not have included in our standard yet. Given this sort of thing is a bit of a moving target, it’s important to be always looking at it.

• Week started with follow-on from last week’s RedShift issue - difficult conversation about cost of change. It was swiftly followed by another escalation by which point I was already done for the week.

• I had some great conversations with Flexera about SaaS management. Really excited to be reaching out into the space more and exiting in some of the new things this unlocks for us and for customers. Lots more than just licensing management.

• Some time spent on our AWS root MFA, which has historically been a painful thing to scale and management. Some discussion based on the recent announcement that this can now be centralised in the AWS Organisation.

• Another week fighting Kusto query for some Azure reporting, this time for backups. Not great when all the documentations says AzureDiagnostics and the table doesn’t exist. Another great one Microsoft, but something I resolved in the end.

• Enjoying digesting all the recent announcements from both Ignite (most AI and Agents) and Pre:Invent (root MFA and Aurora serverless scale-to-zero)

• Keeping me sane this week was the intense but always enjoyable Bear Season 2 and the light relieve of binge watching Only Murders in the Building from the start.

• The week started focusing on a customer issue. AWS Redshift, single table, 63B rows of unsorted data. Not exactly the sort of thing you come across every day for sure. Lots of discussions about the various options of handle to handle this and help the customer get back to something that was sorted and performant when running large queries. Lots of ideas discussed. Short answer: spend more money for more computer and wait.

• On Wednesday I spent time working through more portfolio strategy stuff and talking about wardley mapping and nudge theory for a few folks - always enjoy this and bringing these tools and ideas to new folks.

• Thursday was a session in Gloucester with out Managed Services team discussing methods for improving our lifecycle management. Organisations often outsource to MSPs with all their technical debt intact, knowing that their own management of out-of-date things has been poor. The discussion has been how we can make the work we do in improving this siltation more pro-active and visible. Lots of discussion about both process and tools. My ideas about how this looks more and more like a platform rather than a service are starting to take shape.

Some interesting links from this week:

• Someone’s re-written VB6 in C#
• An amazing map of Starlink Satellites

• The week started at 5:44, as I boarded my first train on the way to our Leeds office. Expecting to go there to meet a few collogues for an operational meeting (reviewing the progress of our sales strategy) but was very pleasantly surprised by having our entire product team there, our new cohort of graduates and a new starter I hadn’t had chance to meet yet. It was very unexpected but I got to have lots of great conversations about everything from odd Claranet history, to new product ideas and creative ways to a few organisational challenges. Despite not getting home until 21:30, I was left feeling really positive about the day.

• The following day, I was in our London office to meet with the Digital Apps team to discuss new portfolio and the roadmap for some internal tooling. Like many of our internal tech teams, they straddle the divide between doing customer-facing/paid-for work and internal work to support others and finding that balance is always tricky. I’ve worked with this team now for many years, they’ve come along with me on my own journey and while there was I time when we’d not seen each other face to face for while, we’re now getting to meet about once a quarter (I wish it was more) and I’m always excited by their energy and passion for what they do. There is something special how having a development team who builds products in this organisation and I appreciate what it adds.

• Reviewing the Top-50 customers and their respective account plans. I’m now splitting the responsibility between myself and my CTO to ensure that between us we spend good quality time with these customers. A good spread for organisations across different industries so this is really valuable insight to what’s working and what’s changing and what we could be doing better.

• The azure reporting side project has taken me down the path of the Azure Resource Graph explorer and writing Kusto/KQL queries. Two reasons for this: it’s much more efficient that calling the individual APIs themselves (like 50x more efficient - ask me how I know) and it’s actually a bit more reliable. I have a love/hate relationship with it though as it’s sometimes difficult to debug, Azure’s data is sometimes poor, undocumented or inconsistent and there are still things that are not available by this method. However, this type of non-critical-path, swearing-laden hack-fest is really the only way I learn - so that’s a plus.

• Had approx. 2 sales call every day this week, talking about both new customers but more about account plans for existing customers. Exploring the use of OSINT ideas and tools like DNS Dumpster to help get deeper understanding of our customer’s environment beyond our current visibility. Helping sales use this type of information to have more meaning conversation.

• 3 vendor calls this week, mostly evaluating new technology to underpin new services or expand existing ones. Calls with Red Hat about OpenShift, Anodot about FinOps and Flexera about SaaS Management. In a related note, it’s been quite nice to see a lot of ex-CloudHealth employees make their way over to Flexera - some good people there.

• My side-project of the week has been to start expanding our Azure reporting capability in the same way I have recently done for AWS. Python and Azure APIs - should be fun, but expecting to run into many Azure Shit’s along the way. This is part of a future extension of Project-N.

• Background shows this week included Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - S01 and the amazing Rivals - S01 in which is incredible and not long enough.

• Project-R continues to drag on - an RFP document of p180 and 175k words. Expect this to give Ulysses a run for it’s money in the end.

• Project-N for two days this week, with deep focus on contract review for a couple of our oldest/largest customers - as anyone working in a large organisation will know, customer contracts build up over time so understand what applies now and what has been replaced can be complicated. This week involves reviewing multiple contracts for customers. This is about ensuring that our legal and contracting moves an innovates as well as engineering.

• ControlMonkey POC complete and we start to discuss rolling out to customers. Control Monkey has one feature that I love - tracking drift. This seems like a straightforward thing and technically I suppose that it is, however strategically this is quite important. Despite our passion for using IaC to manage environments we still have customer where ClickOps happens and sometimes we have a need to do so ourselves. The important thing here is that the drift feature allows both modes to co-exist without too much friction as control monkey will identify drift and allow changes to be imported - great for mixed-mode environments.

• This weeks background is Star Trek: Strange New Worlds - S01 which follows my on-going dive back into the Star Trek universe.

• Reviewing SLAs, OLAs and standards as part of Project-R - great and valid questions coming out of this process. Identifying and filling in gaps and inconsistencies where I find them. Lots of discussions and a little way off from implementing the changes but being customer-driven is exactly how you enhance your services for the better so this has been a great exercise. SLAs in particular can get very complicated, very quickly especially when it comes to compound SLAs and overlapping SLAs. I’ve added this to my blog queue because there is definitely more to write on this topic.

• Working with out internal developer platform team to review the re-design of our customer off-boarding workflow. There are several scenarios we see here: leaving us for another partner, leaving us and taking it back in-house, leaving and decommissioning, staying but partial decommission. This is one of those topics that can sometimes be difficult to talk about internally because on one likes to talk about customers leaving but it is a reality and I feel that the more positive and seamless you make the experience the more likely they are to feel comfortable coming back again in the future. Designing these workflows with the team so we can design to make this as easy as possible in our platform.

• Project-N continues this week with me spending all of Thursday and Friday reviewing all our AWS customers from first principles - what they have, what they are contracted against, what gaps there are and opportunities for us to do more. Lots of areas coming out for us to improve our services and how pro-active we are, nothing scary but lots of work and some exciting things we can now automate away in the coming months.

• This week’s background noise is Slow Horses - S02, heck not just background noise, this is one of my favourite new shows.

We’re spending some time focusing on the house because we’re thinking about moving next year. We’ve lived where we are for almost 10 years now, a lot has happened here and we both feel it’s time for a change. Our house currently just sits outside of the town (5 minutes drive) and we’re looking to move back into the country and get the horses living on our own land. A big ambition and probably typical for the stage of our lives we’re in.

I suppose the only activity done this week that’s relevant to the usual content I write about on here is that had my first attempt at decluttering my office. That means going through those boxes old cables, old gadgets, empty boxes and draw with books I value.

Things I learnt re-discovered as a result of this activity:

1. I have too many old hard drives with content I don’t need or use any more. Time for some review and backups.
2. No one needs that many USB cables - seriously, you don’t!
3. I think my experience with using a mechanical keyboard was a bit of a failure. I used it for about 18-months, it was mostly hated in the house because of it’s noise and I really didn’t like it as much as my old USB Apple Magic Keyboard. I’ll be selling this one off soon. Like all geeks who fall down this rabbit hole, I’ll likely re-try this experiment in a couple of years time.
4. I have lots of ebooks that I don’t read and only a handful of physical books that I have read cover-to-cover (some several times) these are:

• The Manager’s Path by Camille Fournier
• Team Topologies by Manuel Pais and Matthew Skelton
• Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps by Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren
• Atlas of the Heart: Mapping Meaningful Connection and the Language of Human Experience by Brené Brown

Some interesting links from this week:

• Sergey Brin | All-In Summit 2024
• Hume.ai

I spend this first week with the family in Centre Parcs - this year at Longleat. Meredith loved Eleven last year and this year was no different (the consistency helps). While there is the usual busy fan fair of swimming, bike riding and other adventurous activities I also really value to down time and the quiet woodland setting.

This year I’ve been much better at the work detox - only permitting myself 5 minutes a day to read emails (but not respond to any!). I’ve also been using that old GTD method of just writing down my thoughts and ideas on a page as a virtual inbox (in this case in Obsidian) which gets it out of my head and allows me to focus more on the activities in the moment.

Anyway, it’s been a great week, feeling a lot more relaxed now and I’m off home tomorrow for another week off, focused on home activities.

Bonus: a couple of interesting links:

• They Built This Robot For Your Home
• I Lived With a Humanoid Robot for 48 Hours

• The consistent theme of this week has been death by 30m call. I feel like I’m spoken to most people in our organisation at some point this week on everything from Project-R, to vendors and portfolio to tech practices and managed services. While exhausting, and this happens to time-to-time, on reflection it feels satisfying to have helped a large number of people.

• As part of continued work to consolidate some of our SharePoint sites, I ran accidentally ran into the infamous 5000 limit issue, which killed one of our portfolio site. SharePoint is clearly happy to store more than 5k objects in a library but don’t you dare to try search it or build a site page that queries it. Best part of this issue - is that it just silently fails and queries stop working and thus dynamic pages go blank. Quick fix - but damn was it annoying.

• Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been working on enhancing the code we use for AWS environment reporting. This includes everything from resources out of date, unused resources, compliance issues etc. All these help feed activities into our managed service teams. I’ve always found that learning about AWS services is best done by exploring the APIs and it’s also the way I refresh my knowledge after having spent a bit of time away from being hands on. This was a great activity and one of those not-critical-path ways that I can still code and add value without impacting our engineers.

• As part of the code I was writing I discovered the endoflife.date service. There were a few things missing so I raised by first PR against this. I expect to contribute more to this in the future.

• Discussions have started about introducing the Digital Apps portfolio from the wider group into the UK. We’ve been doing everything from developing bespoke applications, modernising applications onto new technology or building integrations and bots. This is all something that I want to bring to our UK customers and I’ve very excited to start working more in this space. Lots and lots more to come on this topic.

• I got to work on a customer separation this week - not something that comes up often but interesting when it happens. The customer in question was going through a divestment of part of their business and we were continuing to be responsible for the management of the environment for both organisations. Not just working with my legal and sales colleges, this also means supporting teams in updating systems and transitioning services - all without operational impact to the customer. One of those things that unfortunately has enough nuance to be difficult to automate.

• Week started with a demo of Control Monkey this a nice tool, from the founder of Spot.io and helps manage large Terraform environments. Managing Terraform at the scale of an MSP, with multiple customers, multiple repositories and multiple Terraform versions is the type of problem where only a dedicated tool will do. I look forward to playing with this more - updates to come.

• Tuesday was a workshop in Gloucester to launch a new internal project (here to referred to as Project-N) with a focus on software lifecycle management. Our customers are an ever evolving landscape of new operating systems, function code and PaaS engine versions - ensuring we’re always on-top of these is key to offering a pro-active managed service.

• Our internal developer platform launched some new capabilities to support our AWS engineers, replacing existing scripts that had been in use for 7 years with functionality is a properly managed platform and increasing security and reliability as a result.

• Outside of work I had an attempt to rebuild of daughters tablet who’s USB port had failed and was therefore failing to charge. This required taking the entire device apart. Unfortunately, despite following the YouTube videos this was a failure and I ended up buying a new tablet anyway. Always sharing my failures as well as my successes.

Some other interesting things:

• Building apps with National Rail data

• Started the week on Project-R content, more questions, more content to write.

• 1st day in London presenting to sales on the latest Q2 cloud offerings. It’s amazing just how many opportunities there are and how many customers still haven’t migrated or have migrated and are still running their cloud environment like an old data centre. I love these types of sessions because I get some fresh perspectives and great questions.

• 2nd day in London on the first customer presentation for Project-R. There are 10 sessions with the customer for this project. Never had anything like this before as an RFP - but it’s exciting and it’s these types of thins that make you grow as a company (and as an individual for that matter!)

• Thursday was a tale of two-halves. Our SharePoint online instance almost ran out of space so there was an urgent task of backup, archive and consolidation work to done. This urgency was balanced out by a clam evening spent in London watching Tim Minchin at Guardian Live for the launch of his new book.

• The remainder of the week was more Project-R sessions, both internal and with customer.

• Watched Star Trek Discovery - S04 to keep me sane.

My entire week was mostly spent on Project-R. Collaborating with engineers, solutions architects, managed services and starting to write down lots and lots of content.

As a brief interlude I got to have a session with our external finance auditors to discuss intangibles for capitalisation (i.e. internal projects we’ve worked on for service updates) - who says my job it’s exciting!

• Got started on one of the largest RFPs I’ve seen to-date. Very long, very detailed, it look me a few hours to read before even being able to think about responses. I think this one is going take a lot of time over the next few weeks.

• One of our AWS customers had some downtime this week as a result of an EFS scaling issue. Turns out there were still set to bursting mode not elastic. This is one of those incident’s that in isolation looks like a fix-and-move-on type incident but it has opened up a can of worms about resilience that needs further thought and discussion with the customer. A unpleasant reminder that if you don’t test your resilience then it’s unlikely to work when you need it. Writing up this report was a fun one.

• Wrapping up some of the portfolio work from last week we started the discussion about bringing more cloud-native features (K8s, IaC etc.) to our private cloud offering. Historically there has been little demand for this - but now we’re seeing more than one or two conversations about staying on private cloud and not migrating due to cost.

• Balancing out the chaos by watching Severance - S01. Weird and awesome.

Admin and killing off things

This week, work has mostly been a lot admin-y type work with the unfortunate complexity of being just outside of the capabilities of our internal GPT instance. Given that some of this is mind-numbingly boring, I’ve been taking my usual tactic of loud music in the background to keep me motivated - I should probably stick all this into a playlist to share for people in the same situation.

Some nice complements

I’ve also been giving some time and attention to one of my favourite things to do - killing off old stuff. In this case it means killing off old parts of our SharePoint and helping product managers end of life some very old services.

I’ve had some very positive commentary this week, with one individual asking “Do you actually run the place?”. Well, one could take this a compliment or one would take it an indictment of the lack of systems, training and retention, but I’m going to take it somewhere in the middle of those things.

I’ve also been asked by the MD to present to one of our largest ever potential customers - which can be nothing but complimentary.

Unusually sociable week

Outside of work, we had a lovely dinner party with some friends this week where everything from hobbies, children and politics were discussed. Despite the mid-week late night, I’m increasingly finding myself energised by these sorts of things.

I also had the opportunity for some face to face time with my oldest friend, which always warms the sole.

I’ve recently noticed that both in a work and a personal setting that I am taking more and more of the role of a coach, I guess building upon my experience as well as the coaching and therapy I have received. This is something I want to explore more, maybe in a more formal way as I am really starting to enjoy it.

Links and Projects

A few more interesting Links this week on the brain, how to build software and RSS - you know my usual stuff.

I’ve also purchased a Bluefruit LE Sniffer for a small upcoming project to try and reverse engineer the bluetooth remote for my treadmill - so keep an eye out on a post about that.

• reviewing current product roadmaps (what’s coming and what’s ending) - pretty happy how it’s coming together.
• re-reading my 2023+ technology strategy document - still stands up but probably needs a re-work in a few places. Should be updated annually.
• writing some scripts that help enable various cloud features we find useful when on-boarding a new customer.
• following up on the AWS service deprecation debacle and putting together the plan.
• writing a new job description - it’s been a while since I’ve done that. Every time I forgot how difficult it is to write a good one.
• started playing about with Copilot Studio - my brain is starting to fire with some ideas about where we can use this more.

Some other interesting things:

• Automating against link rot - use for a blog that’s intending to be around for a while.
• Neura Robotics new video

It’s the time when not only do I catch up on some fiction but also those long form articles that seem a bit too much after a long working week.

One thing I also like about the camping trips are the late night conversations around the fire. It’s the time when you hear those stories about things that are most important and most impactful.

Anyway, as you’d expect there have been a few scribbles notes and tasks added to my second brain and my mind wonders free, so expect a few more blog posts and interesting little devlogs over the coming weeks about things I’ve been pondering.

Products and Service

I spent another than day in the office this, with two back-to-back workshops: one involving product structure and the other on evolution of managed services and customer experience. Ordinarily these would be great sessions in their own right on any given day, but when put together on the same day it brings a whole new perspective. I’m deeply excited about making our services easier to consume and having our teams be more proactive and engaged with customers. The most value I’m had in my new role is the time I’m spent with customers and solving their immediate problems. I can’t wait for every engineer to have that engagement.

Vendor vs Partner

I had a couple of calls with third-party vendors this week. That is pretty typical and business as usual, but I think what made it stand out to me was the repeated conversation about “vendor vs partner”. Vendors are important, we all have to buy are software and services from somewhere but if that software or service is underpinning the way I do my business then I want more than a transactional relationship. Partners have a shared relationship, a mutual business plan, both putting time and money into mutual success. I’m also increasing more interested in evolving these even further to build “communities” of multiple partners (and even customers) building a shared outcome. Task added to write more on this.

Changelog

As part of the plan of restructuring how I write my week notes, this week I added a lot of new pages to the site include /links, /now and /devlog. Lots more to come on this. Keep an eye out on the /changelog for more.

This is week number 16 (4 months) of me writing up weeknotes, it’s been challenging at times but I’m still getting value from it so I will continue to do it. I’ll write up a bit more on this in a blog post next week but see below for some ideas I have to change up the format of this a little in future weeks.

What I’ve been doing

This week starting with our annual sales kick-off on Monday with me not only getting to sit and listen to all the amazing initiatives and updated compensation plans but also to present on some specific products and roadmap we’re working on and to answer questions. I love collaborating with sales folks because it really makes you answer those fundamental customer questions like “what’s the business value of this?”, “how does this thing work with X?” and “how does this product compare with X that I already have?”. It sounds basic but you’d be surprised how many struggle to articulate answers to these well.

I may have said on these weeknotes before that I do get some energy and motivation from being around and talking to people, but I am glad it was only one day (I am a true ambivert!)

I also got to participate is a great sales retrospective this week. As I mentioned in the past couple of weeknotes, I had been working on a very large bid proposal. There are always lessons learnt out of these things but there is one truth to them all - we should always be as quick and easy to do business with as possible. If it takes us weeks to response (even if that’s the timeline) then it’s not really a good look. I look forward to doing more of these and thinking more about tooling in this space that could help.

On a more technical note this week, I’ve been experimenting with writing some scripts to start gathering OSINT on customers (and potential customers). One of the hardest problems in managed services is getting all the technical information from a customer in order to know what services to sell to whom. Relationship building and P2P contact will only get you so far, in bigger organisations your contacts might not even know everything going on. Working smarter, not harder.

What I’ve been thinking about

With one of my previous employers Mimecast releases their new Human Risk Management platform it makes me think more about the scope of this idea. Most of the industry is focused on training or identify risk like DLP. What if we went a bit further and we took the penetration testing approach? What if the person was the asset and their available information (via OSINT techniques) were vulnerabilities?

What I’ve been watching

This week my ad-hoc watching has mostly been about one topic - Robots!

• All the Figure videos
• Astribot
• Ameca
• Tesla Optimus
• Digit

What else

Well I’m thinking about a few changes to future weeknotes merges the “doing” and “thinking” sessions here. I also think the “listening” and “reading” are likely to move to their own /links sections of this site and “watching” and “real life” sections moving to /now. I’m not sure yet if this will make them more concise or more long-form - it’s been an experiment from the start so we’ll have to see.

What I’ve been doing

This week I have been working on the largest bid of my career - 65k words and counting + other attachments (of which I personally wrote at least 30k). Always good to get into the weeds on these things and also a realisation that when needing to write about topics I know well to a very tight deadline - I can actually succeed. Maybe all this practice here is paying off.

This week I have also been adding another tool into my tool set - Todoist. I was a Todoist user many years about but I’ve now come back to it and I’m really enjoying it. I also have it integrated into Obsidian so there is no context switching when I’m in flow there.

What I’ve been thinking about

I’ve been thinking a lot about repeatability. I wonder how many times an engineer as solved the problem of a particular upgrade path or moving from service A to service B? I think these small packages of work - while a massive catalogue of things should be something we strive for.

What I’ve been listening to

• Well it’s been Glastonbury this week - so listening to that in the background to keep me motivated. I’m also surprised how many artists I had never heard of before. That’s a sign of getting old.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

I spend the Monday on this week a Thorpe park, my daughters first visit and our second theme park visit of the month. Always a great family time.

What I’ve been doing

I’ve been writing down the stuff I do for a while, in scribbled books, 1:1 notes or brag documents. As an alternative, this week I have started doing daily notes in Obsidian. Like many other I use a bit of a template for this, but it’s not too complicated. For obvious reasons, unlike weeknotes I won’t be posting my daily notes anywhere public but it does come in handy when taking the time to reflect on the week for these posts.

I also started this week working on scripts to scan out environments for out of date services, based on the amazing site endoflife.date. Keeping up-to-date on platforms, services, frameworks and applications is not easy feet in a single complex environment let alone in a managed service provider with thousands of customers. I’ve started to experiment with this service to see what value it can provide.

What I’ve been thinking about

I’ve had a few conversations with people this week about blogging and it’s many forms. It may be obvious if your reading this or anything else I’ve posted but I think blogging is really valuable, whether it’s a publicly-facing blog or an internal one. The value is writing things down what we work on and sharing it out there. I’m looking forward to continuing these conversations and encouraging a culture of writing within this organisation.

On the topic of writing, I have also been thinking about another post-type: the devlog. Over the past few months I’ve been back to writing bits of code, small scripts, automation tasks and even the odd iOS shortcut. Oddly, the rest of my blog posts aren’t actually technical, so I thought I’d follow up with a different type of blog post when I can share at depth more technical things I am working on (like the endoflife.date things I mentioned above). Maybe I’ll see how that goes for a while.

What I’ve been reading

If you’ve seen my blogroll you’ll know that I subscribe to a couple of sections of arxiv.org and get a lot of computer science and AI white papers in my RSS feed. While I’m now started going through my backlog. I’ve even set myself a recurring task to remember to read at least 5 a week. I am sure some more interesting ideas and topics will emerge from this.

What I’ve been listening to

• A Bit Of Optimism podcast with freediver Li Karlsen - a great podcast about fear, stress and how nose breathing can help manage it.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

Well this week was an interesting family milestone. After having had a Ukrainian family staying in our home for 2 years, we finally said good bye to them as they moved into their own home. It came with mixed emotions and our house felt massive and just a bit weird for a few days, but I am very happy for them.

What I’ve been doing

This week has been about scaling and automation. Working with different team from portfolio, delivery and managed services to work through the details of some small adjustments to improve how we can deliver more to customers faster aka scale. I’ve also been going into more depth on our levels of automation, especially in the dark corners when automation is not systems but scripts. Trying to pull it all together into one solution.

I’ve also spent some good face-to-face time with the internal development team. I’ve worked with these guys longer than most folks in the company and yet I’ve not actually seen them face to face in several years. It’s been great to spend time in the office with them discussing the roadmap for a internal product.

What I’ve been thinking about

I’m been thinking a lot this week about what helps get me into a flow state. You’d think at my age and stage of career I might have this topic nailed, but I actually think that is this something that evolves over time and occasionally needs a revisit. While I still find for the mundane tasks that music & movement or tv-in-the-background works, I’ve increasingly found that my best work (which is mostly writing these days) is done in silence. I have earplugs for that too which really helps. Over the past few months, I’ve found my best work is done in a comfortable location, well hydrated and with my earplugs in. Certainly not created flow for the 20-year old self.

What I’ve been watching

Well, with lots of things happening over the past few weeks I’ve actually built up quite the backlog.

This week, I managed to finish Doctor Who - Series 14 and all the various companion shows. I have also started watching The Boys - Season 2 - probably more on that next week.

What I’ve been listening to

I’m going to be a bit sneaky on this one this week. I’ve not been listening to anything specific, just lots of random things from Spotify playlists. Given that my Spotify profile doesn’t yet appear on my About page, consider this soft-launch until I update that page.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

Well, nothing out of the ordinary - but hasn’t it been wonderful to be out in the sun this week.

What I’ve been doing

This week has mostly been about thinking about what a modern managed service looks like. What does an outsource ITIL managed service need to look like? How pro-active? What do the commitments and outputs need to look like? How does it need to “feel” in 2024. This has all meant lots of conversation, lots of writing and lots of supporting people to think outside of their comfort zone.

On this site, I have also been trying to sort out my RSS feeds a bit more to make them easier to share and consume by putting them into more appropriate categories (see /changelog for more).

I’ve mentioned in weeknotes before that I am an pretty active Obsidian user. I have also been a Notion user for other uses for some time. As I prepare for a future blog post of this topic, I have been spending a lot of time trying to migrate more from Notion to Obsidian and experimenting with various plug-ins. I will still be doing this for a few more weeks I think - but overall it’s been pretty fun.

What I’ve been thinking about

I’ve been thinking a bit about starting another type of post on this site for “devlogs”. This would be a way for me to write up all the random scripts, automation and bits of debugging information author every now and then. No commitment on this right now - but I thinking a lot about this and the frequency of it.

I’ve also been thinking quite a bit about what’s on this site vs what I keep privately in by Obsidian vault. There is quite a bit of stuff in my vault right now that with a small polish I think would be useful to publish here. I am not sure if it would all be blogs or some other type of format, but I thinking about it.

What I’ve been reading

I saw this great post this week on Jevon’s Paradox. This is interesting perspective when thinking about the speed of AI development. I also think I might have a blog post in me about this in relation to how to think about product in relation to this paradox.

I’ve been digging into Application Maintenance and Support (AMS) services this week and came across this interesting article on AI’s impact to this AMS and the small industry that sits around it.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

This week has had a lot of activity with starting to move yards and finally getting my treadmill back up and running.

What I’ve been doing

I’ve been speaking to customers and working on a lot of bids lately. What I’ve realised is how important is it to have written down how your products work and how your business operates. This transparency builds confidence and trust. This means that I’ve been writing a lot, this week about 30k words of content. This has required deep focus and not much time for anything else, but it has also allows me to build some templates to make this easier in the future and have some great conversations with colleagues I don’t work with often. Tiring but extremely positive.

What I’ve been thinking about

I love to share things I find on my travels around the internet. I share with friends and with colleagues based on conversations we’ve had previously or their areas of work or interests. While I will absolutely continue to do this, I’m thinking about adding /link page for all the articles I reading and add notes to every week. Not sure on the technical details yet but something I want to do.

What I’ve been reading

A little bit more progress with my reading list due to some sleepless nights but I’ve added more to my list than I can read. A internet deep-dive into Dystopia, Cyberpunk and the many other related genres and sub-genres has opened up some future reading material of both classics and recent award winning authors. The reason why I love these genres is that it’s great way to get ideas about the future and to think about how sci-fi has historically shaped the future we live in now.

What I’ve been watching

• Eric (Netflix) - Another fantastic character thriller staring Benedict Cumberbatch. Binge it now.

What I’ve been listening to

Actually not much this week. I’m usually smashing through my podcasts on a weekly basis and often posting new ones here. However I’m now got quite a long backlog and I’m coming to the conclusion that I might be reaching a practical limit of how much I can consume in a given week.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

Well, very frustratingly the week started with a broken treadmill (having just posted this post on the topic). This will hopefully be replaced next week, but I’ve certainly noticed that I feel different without the daily exercise. But it wasn’t all bad, I’ve been focusing on a few side projects to increase the automation of my daily life. Also daughter started rugby which I’ve enjoyed watching and I’m really happy for her.

What I’ve been doing

Working through our product roadmaps for the next year - making sure all different product areas fit together nicely. Also balancing that with talking to some of our customers who have had or are having problems with us to make sure we can effectively deliver what we currently sell before taking on newer shinier things. Also bids (gotta love enterprise sales) which means a few weeks of content discovery, content writing and asking questions like “can we?” and “should we?”.

What I’ve been thinking about

I hope that as AI usage continues to increase in the enterprise as it will make knowledge management so much easier. I clearly come to this conclusion from having spent some time both writing content, updating content and searching for content produced by others. I know for certain that I won’t be the only one who would love this type of work to be fundamentally altered and even removed by AI.

What I’ve been reading

Just a little update on my book reading I guess. In Weeknote-01 I said that I had started reading the murderbot diaries. Well I’m now finishing off the 4th book (Exit Strategy) in the currently 7-book series - told you I was slow.

What I’ve been watching

• Foundation - Season 2 (Apple TV) - only a few episodes in but it is indeed an easier watch than the first series.

What I’ve been listening to

• Undefeated - Frank Turner - Given that me and my wife have a collective love on Mr Turner (with out annual gig pilgrimage), it should be no surprised that I loved this album. Frank returning to his shouty/political roots.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

Gardening for the first time this year, which means up to the knees in grass. We’ve also started “the big clear out” in preparation for what I think might be a house move at some point in the next 12-months.

What I’ve been doing

Discussing with a customer about how to move off an ancient k8s cluster deployed on AWS EC2 with kOps - everyone knows I love a bit of technical archaeology. On the other end of the spectrum I have been working on writing about all the details of application support for random (industry specific) applications and how to manage them in a modern way. Fun week all round really :)

What I’ve been thinking about

When does an AI become something of your very own? Seems like a bit of an odd question but if you take some near-future AI (and by near-future I mean like next month) where it can see my screen, read my emails, see my search history, knows my activity and my preferences - is that AI actually mine? At what point is a foundation model, so sufficiently fine-tuned on my data, on me, that in essence a completely new AI focused on me? Also, when do I get it?

What I’ve been reading

Well this week’s reading is a bit meta as I’ve mostly been working through other people’s blogrolls finding more blogs to add to my feed. Every time someone mentions a blogroll on one of my social media feeds than it becomes an open tab for me to read though. At the start of this week it was 35 open tabs, it’s now 15. Some new some entering my feed - updates to /blogroll coming soon.

What I’ve been watching

Still finishing off Foundation (about to start Season 2) but also catching up on a couple of other guilty-pleasure shows.

• Grey’s Anatomy - S20 (Disney+) - I’ve been watching this on/off for years, in fact I think I got to about season 10 and had a very large break from it for a few years and then watched it all again from the beginning. It’s pure soap opera, but with characters I actually don’t hate most of the time. It’s also one of those shows that feels like everyone is expecting it (or wants it to) end after every season but it just keep finding ways to hand in there and I’m glad.
• Station 19 - S7 (Disney+) - The Grey’s Anatomy spin off that I don’t hate, easily stands up on it’s own with a great cast of characters. Sadly, S7 is the final season.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

I’ve spend some good time with friends when the weather wasn’t so bad, and I’ve been back on the treadmill again after almost a week off. Focusing now one some small diet changes in order to help improve the dad-bod situation (more on this in another post).

What I’ve been doing

I’m been exploring new services. Can’t talk much about them publicly here, but putting my PM hat on for a little while and working with engineers on what some new services look like it always something I enjoy doing.

Also been working with our customer teams on fixing some long standing problems that will really improve the consistency of our customer experience.

What I’ve been thinking about

Well you know I love tweaking this site and adding more to it, so I’m been thinking about adding more slash pages.

I’ve also been spending a bit more time building out a blog post roadmap. Wondering if I should take that out of my Notion page and post it here as a slash page.

What I’ve been reading

Well it’s been Microsoft Build this week so I’m been digging into all the announcements on their usual Book of News

What I’ve been watching

• Foundation (Apple TV) - Based on the work of Isaac Asmimov this is your traditional sci-fi affair. The first season is a bit dry and requires some serious watching but I’m told season 2 is a bit of an easier watch.
• Doctor Who - Series 14 (BBC/Disney) - I don’t even have to tell you more about this. I love it. Binge watching both the main series and the behind the scenes and commentaries.

What I’ve been listening to

Well our car has been full of Taylor Swift for years now, especially as my daughter is really into a the moment. So with the release of the new The Tortured Poets Department album, I like everyone else have it pumping into my ears.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

Actually not much this week. With being slightly ill I’ve been much less active then usual and some of my regular personal todo items have fallen by the way side. Hoping this will pick up over the weekend and into next week.

What I’ve been doing

More customers, more deals. Still surprising that after all these years there are still folks out there who haven’t migrated to the cloud yet. There are also so many organisations that find themselves adrift for support when a bad exit from an exiting outsource provider occurs. This is my in my 7 powers blog post this month I still think customer experience is a massive problem in our industry and one that can be a competitive advantage.

I’m also hear some whispers of things like repatriation and cloud-to-cloud migrations again. It’s sort of funny the types of things you get to work on during the economic dip.

I’ve also spent a lot of time with my development team this week looking at the development roadmap. It’s very exiting building a platform underneath the unique challenges of an MSP.

What I’ve been thinking about

I think that one of the many challenges we’re going to face over the coming months is the complexity of the AI landscape. Which model do I choose? Which one is best for my problem? How to I measure and compare multiple models effectively against my specific success criteria. All of these are going to be interesting problems to dig into.

What I’ve been reading

Along the continued theme of me expanding my depth of latest AI knowledge, I’ve been signed-up to a new newsletter and browsing the archive of: AI News

What I’ve been watching

• Responder - Season 2 (BBC) - Having just come off the back of watching Blue Lights two weeks ago, this felt right at home. Martin Freeman is always great and I’d been looking forward to this second series.

What I’ve been listening to

A bit sneaky, I’ve been half-listening, half-watching this interview with Sam Altman on The Possibilities of AI

What I’ve been doing in the real world

I guess I am mindful that the pace of things can from time to time mean that a week can fly past with little more than a brief acknowledgement. To help balance that out and as part of the habit forming I was looking at a couple of weeks ago, I’ve starting using the Oak meditation app again - 10 minutes a day to just slow me down a bit. I’ve found it very useful and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on this once I’ve been doing it for a while.

What I’ve been doing

I’m been talking to customers again, which is great. It’s been over a year since I’ve really been on the front line and I’ve forgotten how much I love talking to customers about their real problems. 3 customers this week and lots of follow-up calls with engineers, product managers and sales folk to really paint a picture about what’s working and what isn’t. Also some time to write a bit of code to help some engineers better price things and I feel like this is my happy place again.

What I’ve been thinking about

How to find sources of innovation happening outside of the AI bubble. Tech has literally become a fire hose of AI to the point where it feels almost impossible to hear about anything else happening. It’s been making me think about how I can further diversify my sources of information to hear about things happening on the edges that don’t involve AI.

What I’ve been reading

Lots of AI white papers including the original Transformer paper and this new interesting one on Filler Tokens

What I’ve been watching

• Slow Horses - Season 1-3

What I’ve been doing in the real world

Well, with first glimmer of sunshine this week was spent in the garden, pottering around and cleaning up in preparation of a good solid 3-4 hours of hard work at the weekend. Those of you who want to know how I managed to listen to so many podcasts every week - well this is it. If it’s not time spent with the horses and filling hay nets then it’s in the garden. This is good, healthy mindless activity where I can digest information and let me mind wander.

What I’ve been doing

Writing scripts to take inventory of customer environments. Financial modelling. All feels very 2021.

What I’ve been thinking about

Habits - and what’s my next nudge? After reading the famous Atomic Habits I periodically make small adjustments to my daily routines to add in new things I want to do. Most of the time this is things that take me 10-20 minutes a day, like Duolingo or changing my breakfast, other times this is bigger things like buying a treadmill. I’m starting to think about what’s list of small changes I want to do and over what time frame. More on this in future weeknotes I think.

What I’ve been reading

Zero. Well, not quite but my feed has been building up and it’s been a lot less reading and a lot more reading of YouTube videos as part of my on-going AI learning/research.

Although one thing that sent me off in a bit of a rabbit hole this week is: Synthesia’s AI Avatars.

What I’ve been watching

• 3 Body Problem (Netflix) - Not the type of sci-fi show you can watch in the background, it really needs watching. It reminds me a bit of Sense8 from a few years ago.

What I’ve been listening to

New podcast - Last Week in AI for updates on everything going on in AI world.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

In Weeknote-02 I mentioned I’d just purchased a walking treadmill, well the past couple of weeks have been a bit of an experiment figuring out what types of work I can do a different speeds. Also trying to train my brain to operate and faster and faster speeds (just like I did with podcast listening). I also did some messing about with getting a video background working for Teams. Feel like I’ll expand this weeknote update into a full blog post soon.

What I’ve been doing

This week I’ve been rolling my sleeves up and helping unblock a few projects (again!). That’s meant reviewing documents, writing for code again (it’s been a few months) and lots of calls. Helicoptering in to fix problems isn’t the best thing for an organisation but sometimes it’s required.

It’s been chaos and I have sometimes felt like I was chasing my tail but I have to admit it’s felt good to work on things with a immediate payoff. It’s been mostly AWS projects and it’s been good to spend some time in the ecosystem again.

What I’ve been thinking about

How all the acquisition of IaC tooling vendors (the latest being HashiCorp) seem to get acquired around the 12-15 year mark (see: my toot about this). Think I’ll be buying some Pulumi shares when they IPO in the next 2 years.

The long-term impacts on organisations that re-org every 2-3 years.

What I’ve been reading

Very little this week, but here are a couple of feeds added to my list that are less brain taxing a just, well, nice.

• https://basicappleguy.com/ - I’m a bit of a apple fanboy and this is one of those sites that very visually appealing as well as having some good content.
• https://alondoninheritance.com/ - This is one of many “history of London” sites, but the comparison photos here are a lovely introduction to I city I think is pretty cool.

What I’ve been watching

• Blue Lights - Season 2 (BBC) - Police/Gang shows are my go-to TV genre of choice. Easy to watch, great set of characters. Set in Belfast which gives it a really interesting spin. Binged in a day. Here hoping this gets plenty more seasons.
• Fallout (Amazon) - Not being a gamer (for many years), I’m coming at this show with fresh eyes and few expectations. It’s certainly not a watch-in-the background show as there is a lot to take in, both in terms of the script but also visually. Loving the premise and it’s certainly not the dystopian show I was expecting.

What I’ve been listening to

• Unlocking Us - the famous Brené Brown podcast is back and I’m just eating up all it’s insights and wisdom. I never come way from one of these podcasts without something to think about or research further.

What I’ve been doing

This week has been one of those finishing weeks - several work-in-progress things getting closed off. Satisfying. Almost achieved inbox-zero (almost!).

Spent some time going deep on a customers cloud environment. Felt great to be doing this again (albeit briefly), like putting on an old pair of shoes.

Started going deep this week on my AI learning and research. My notebook is starting to get quite full and it feels a bit like being at university again. Still lots to learn and plenty of videos to watch and white papers to digest but I’m enjoying flexing my brain in learning something new at depth.

What I’ve been thinking about

These are some of the questions that’s helping drive my AI research:

• What are the building blocks / products that are required before you can start with AI services?
• What’s the decision tree in model selection?
• What’s the upgrade path from one model to another?
• What are the practical AI customer use-cases?

What I’ve been reading

Nothing specific bits and pieces of new things as I spend more time reviewing other people blogrolls are expanding the top of the funnel into my RSS feed.

Here two I was going through this week:

• https://hacdias.com/blogroll/

• https://www.stefanjudis.com/blogroll/

What I’ve been listening to

Risky Biz Podcast

What I’ve been doing in the real world

The weather has bit a little bit rubbish this week, so when not with the horses I’ve spent the time planning out some more personal projects (expect to see more visibility of that on the site soon).

What I’ve been doing

There have been some high-profile leavers this week (which I can’t publicly discuss) but it has shaken the office a little, it’s also meant lots of internal networking.

My first team really came together for each other and that’s felt great, I’ve really not felt that team bond like that for quite a long time.

I’ve had two office visits this week, which doesn’t sound much, but given that I predominantly work remotely it’s certainly unusual and note worthy. It was well worth it, but as tiring as I expected. Enjoying being round people though and it’s a great way to get the daily steps in.

What I’ve been thinking about

Based on a great conversation I had with one of our product managers this week, I’ve been thinking more about how the growth and commentary around AI is just like that of the Cloud adoption curve of 15 years ago.

• Similar complexity (which cloud provider do I choose? vs which model do I choose?)
• Similar me-too rush for adoption (look! look! I’m also doing Cloud/AI)
• Similar mis-understood security profile
• Similar mis-understood cost profile.

I think supporting customers from a managed service perspective in their adoption on AI services is going to be great over the next few years (there is probably a deeper blog post on this somewhere)

What I’ve been watching

A little less reading this week and a bit more watching of TV (for recovery time). Reminds me that I need to add sharing my watching list to this site as one of my mini-projects.

• Scoop (Netflix) - great dramatisation of the prince Andrew debacle with the wonderful Gillian Anderson.
• For All Mankind (Apple TV+) (currently on season 2) - my latest sci-fi binge watch about the alternative timeline of the space race, hoping it continues to be renewed up to it’s planned 7 seasons.

What I’ve been listening to

• Practical AI podcast
• Stopped listening to Huberman Lab podcast after the controversy. Need to find a replacement.
• New Libertines album, All Quiet On The Eastern Esplanade - this band always reminds me of my early 20s.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

New walking treadmill. I’ll be giving this a proper review and blog post after I’ve used it for a couple of months, but I was too sedentary (approx. 3000 steps a day) which was starting to impact my health in various ways. Needed an easy way to nudge a habit of more exercise and movement that will work in both winter and summer weather.

I’ve been going on a bit of deep dive of trying to push more of my thoughts, ideas, resources and other random half-baked things out into the universe to see if anyone else gets value from them and that’s when I came across the idea of weeknotes. Not sure if it’ll work or not and it’ll have a very different tone than my usual blog posts, so let’s see.

I’m kinda cheating because this week hasn’t been much of a working week at all as I’ve been on leave for most of the week so I’ve only been working for two days.

What I’ve been doing

This week has been a bit like:

Listening and nodding

Lots of conversations with people over the last few days and getting updates and feedback about all sorts of things going on. It’s not only catching up after having been on leave but also feels like I’ve cemented that reputation of being a good ear for listening to frustrations and being a good rubber duck to work through problems (with the occasional additional context thrown in). For some it’s probably like therapy, but for me it’s a sea of small fragmented notes that allow me to built a bigger picture.

Re-learning Professional Services

I’ve been in a professional services org now for about 8 years which means you’d think I’d have a good grasp of how it all works - turns out there is lots of stuff I wasn’t aware of. Spent a bit of time this week learning the end-to-end journey of how a project starts, get’s resourced and get’s invoiced and all the swirly bits in between. Turns out having a beginners mind is always useful at whatever stage your at.

What I’ve been thinking about

How important knowledge management is in an organisation and how few companies really invest in it. So many assumptions and so few things written down.

How complicated the AI landscape is right now and how deep you can go if you step outside of the OpenAI bubble. I’ve got a mountain of reading to do (both books and white papers) and I expect the next few months to be long.

What I’ve been reading

Well finally put all my blogs into a blogroll

I’ve also started the murderbot diaries series for some light reading, although I’m always a slow reader of fiction.

What I’ve been listening to

I’ve put all my podcasts into a podroll but a recent addition has been Risky.Biz - some good security updates on various chaotic things out in the wild.

What I’ve been doing in the real world

This website has had some updates this week because I’ve been off.

It was my birthday, so I spent time eating great food and laughing with my daughter.

Given that the weather is getting better, I worked from the yard for the first time this year so I got to spend a little extra time with the horses.