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: