This week has been few days where I have mostly had my people manager hat on, 1:1s, appraisals, feedback and hiring. The emotional labour of such a week means that I am very pleased to be heading into a long weekend.

  • 🧍 - Project-R2, after six months of intense work has finally signed. Now the real work begins. Hiring across 3 countries, 4 additional parallel projects to be resourced and that’s just the beginning. It all starts with a lot of CVs reviewing, interviews and onboarding - so a tricky couple of months and not my favourite part, but there is plenty of exciting stuff to be involved in so I’m looking forward to it.

  • - Since the whole Broadcomm debacle of them eliminating more and more partners across Europe, it has been our focus to test a number of alternatives and onboard a second private cloud solution. Our solution of choice is OpenShift and this week I had some time with the team setting up the environment and got to look at our progress, our new tooling and our roadmap. VMware isn’t going anywhere any time soon and we’ve got the big upgrading coming on that front, but having an alternative and some tooling across the both platforms is certainly reassuring.

  • 💭 - The rest of the week for me was about reflections: on the team (from our annual feedback), from my team (having completed more appraisal sessions) and on my own management (as I prepare for another SMT training session is a couple of weeks). I think there is still a lot to do, there is still a lot for me to do. As much as systems and tools need fixing and upgrading in lots of corners of the business, I feel that there is a still a lot of culture work to do. Teams (not just mine) as nervous right now and feeling of job security is at an all time low. This makes people not want to push things, want to push blame for mistakes and it could all spiral quickly. My team are seeing improvements and like each other but concerns can quickly turn to frustrations and I won’t kick that can down the road.

📈 - This weeks stats:

  • 332 minutes of podcasts
  • 4,263 average weekly steps
  • 61 book pages read (Homeland - p70-131)

📺 - This weeks background entertainment: