Weeknotes

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. ...

This week has been a little calmer than previous weeks, it’s given me time to focus on a slider wider range of topics that I have been able to previously. Now that I’m into year 2 of weeknotes, I am also thinking about a couple of additions of the next few weeks. 📓 - 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 Cybersecurity 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 signifiant plans for US expansion - but it was good to see it happen anyway. 📺 - This weeks background entertainment: ...

Birthday week, time in front of the camera and thinking about UX. 🌀 - 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. ...

It’s been a year! I’ve managed to keep up this little weeknote habit for 52 weeks. For something that I thought would probably last a couple of months and then get deleted, I’m pretty happy with myself that I’ve got this far. There have been a few learnings from this process, the main thing being is that there is quite a bit of repetition week-to-week because the projects and initiatives I work on typically take a lot longer than initially expected - planning fallacy right there! Anyway, I’m still enjoying writing these even if it’s only me that’s reading and reflecting on them. ...

A quick one this week and not my usual weeknote. I spent this week in on a work trip to Chaominx, a seasonal work event that used to take place every year but hadn’t been done since 2019 and has now been brought back. This is the time of year when I spend the most time with my peers from other countries and I value every second of it. 🎿 - 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. ...

This week had some good news and the I had so many meetings and adhoc calls I couldn’t really tell you what day it was. Overall though this week is a quick weeknote as there was only a couple of key things really going on this week. 🚌 - 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: ...

In the eye of a hurricane, there is quiet. For just a moment … 🧰 - 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 tickbox 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: ...

One crunch, one roadmap, one deep-dive. This week used all my skills and motivation to get me through to the end, but a great sense of achievement. 🧑🏻‍🤝‍🧑🏻 - 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 call 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 Cybersecurity 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 cybersecurity 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 pentesting and where we’re investing our development time in building new cybersecurity 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: ...

This week has been about old friends, old projects and live editing. 👥 - 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 editting 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: ...

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 financials 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 am help 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 deliverables 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: ...