New portfolio models, more roadmaps and the next big growth oppertunity.

  • 🚅 - I’ve been working for a couple of weeks on a portfolio concept based on a metro map (specifically the london tube map design prinicpals). 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 gettting 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 transparancy. 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 compination of both problem solving, stratric 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: