Weeknotes

Project-R continues to be a significant theme of my weeks, however this week was mostly focused on ensuring the best service experience so I can’t complain too much about that. I will however compain about having to give the best version of myself while it’s 27+ degrees in rooms without aircon. 🥵 📄 - 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 get’s 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 we quite wearysome. 📈 - This weeks stats: ...

This week was a week of things that help build the future. 🪂 - 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 oppertunities. Just reminds me that somestimes despite hardwork 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 faciliate 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 systtems 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 faciliated some conversations about expanding our change catlogue, 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 porfolio 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: ...

I can already tell that June is going to be a busy one with lots of content, lots of collaboration and me writing even more words in even more places. ☁️ - 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 it’s 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 dicussing 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 deliever 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: ...

Some weeks there isn’t a theme, just a grab bag of vaguely interesting stuff happens … ⭐ - My appraisal. If you’ve read any of my blogs or weeksnotes, 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 dont’ 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. 🪴 - 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: ...

Training, reflecting, planning, nurturing … 🦩 - 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: ...

A week of two halves for sure. One of those weeks where you look back and go “wait, did that just happen?” 🇦🇪 - The most of this week was all about the Dubai FinTech Summit. I flew out on Sunday for this event were 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. ⛯ - 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: ...

Where did this week go? A mixed bag of all sorts and then it was the weekend. 🪢 - 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: ...

New people, new questions, new inspiration … 🚸 - 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: ...

I’ve been off this week for some R&R and to focus on a bit of house admin. So it will be a light weeknote this week. 🏠 - 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 background entertainment: ...

Half a working week this week, only Mon-Wed but it didn’t feel any less busy. This week was mostly about supporting our tech practice leaders in thinking about their roadmaps for the new year. I’ve been working on roadmaps and strategy for a while now and over the next year the real task is to delegate more of this work and support the tech practice leaders and their corresponding product managers to really take more ownership and accountability for the direction. ...